Abstract:
Professional socialization is the process of acquisition of the specialized knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, norms, and interests to be socialized into a profession. The evolution of nursing profession and education has taken its pace over the past years. Therefore, with the changes in nursing education over the years, the level of professional socialization among the students has become an area of interest.
The objective of this study was to compare the level of professional socialization between the first year and final year diploma and bachelor of nursing students. It was a cross-sectional comparative study conducted in UCSI University, Nilai University College, University Teknologi MARA (UiTM), and University Sains Malaysia (USM). The instrument used in this study was in the means of questionnaire consisting of 2 sections: Demographic Data Questionnaires (DDQ) and Nurses Professional Values Scale – Revised (NPVS-R) developed by Weis and Schank (2009). The questionnaires were distributed to the students after their class sessions and collected after being completed. The overall response rate was 83.7% with a total of 992 out of 1185 students completed the questionnaires. Data collected were analyzed using The Predictive Analytics Software (PASW) Statistics 18 to compute one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and student t-tests of the research variables.
Findings revealed that the first year bachelor of nursing students had significantly higher level of professional socialization than the first year diploma of nursing students (p = .010). However, no significant difference was found in the level of professional socialization between the final year diploma and final year degree nursing students. Past working experience, main reason of enrolling in nursing, and future goal in nursing were the demographic variables identified to influence the level of professional socialization among the students.
