The Relationship between student nurses’ emotional intelligence and personal and professional values

• Žurnalo archyvas: straipsnio tekstas

ENThe aim was to assess the relationship between emotional intelligence and personal and professional values of undergraduate student nurses. Methods. The Emotional Intelligence and Nursing Values questionnaires were applied with the Likert scale format used for the items. Emotional intelligence and values of student nurses were analyzed and compared using descriptive statistics with non-parametric correlation analysis to explore the relationship between specific variables. The study was conducted with 203 students from 1st to 4th year of the nursing study programme at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences with the response rate of 99.0%. The survey was conducted from October through November 2019. Results. The optimism was the highest rated characteristic of emotional intelligence. The strongest personal values of student nurses were intellectualism and altruism, while authority and intellectualism were the strongest professional values. A positive relationship was found betveen personal students’ value of intellectualism and social skills, as well as between personal students’ value of academic achievement and optimism. Personal value of altruism was positively related to emotional intelligence characteristics of social skills and utilization of emotions at weak and moderate levels, and negatively associated with optimism at the moderate level. Social skills directly correlated with the students’ professional value of altruism.Conclusions. Although emotional intelligence characteristics are quite similar in their expression among undergraduate student nurses, the importance of students’ personal and professional values differs. All personal values, with exception of autonomy and altruism, were lower than respective professional values, and religiosity as personal and professional value was rated at the lowest. Emotional intelligence improves with the development of personal and professional value of altruism, and personal values of intellectualism and academic achievement. Future nurses should learn professional behaviour based on values and emotional intelligence through a role model of educators and mentors. Key Words: student nurses, emotional intelligence, personal values, professional values. [From the publication]

• Psichologija / Psychology
• Sociologija / Sociology