A determination of the factors that affect the level of pediatric nurses' liking of children

Authors: YURDAGÜL ERDEM, VELİ DUYAN

Abstract: Every person under the age of 18 is a child. One's attitude towards children is made up of the person's basic beliefs about children and their reaction to the idea of being with children. Pediatric nurses are expected to understand children's physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development, to advocate for children, and to show affection towards and interest in children. This study is conducted to determine the level of liking of children of nurses who are working at pediatric clinics. Materials and methods: This descriptive study was conducted on 207 nurses employed at pediatric clinics of university and state hospitals. The study uses Barnett's Liking of Children Scale (BLOCS), a 14-item, 7-point Likert-type scale designed to assess the extent to which individuals have a favorable attitude towards children. The validity and reliability of the scale in Turkish has been determined by Duyan and Gelbal in 2008. The score range is 14-98, with high scores indicating that people like children more and low scores indicating that they like children less. Results: In our study, the mean age of the nurses was 31.76 ± 6.25, 38.7% of them graduated from health programs in vocational schools, 67.3% of them were married and 81.7% of the married nurses had children. Hospitals run by the Ministry of Health employed 77.9% of the nurses, 95.7% of them are clinical nurses, and they have been working for an average of 11.3 years (136.28 ± 86.52 months). Each day, the nurses care for 15.63 children (±29.87). Just over half (54.8%) of them read books about children and 67.3% watched television news about children. A great majority of them (81.9%) knew children's games, with the mean number of children's games that nurses knew being 3.32 ± 1.88. Volunteer work was not found to be common; 94.0% of our subjects did not work at voluntary organizations. Of the nurses involved in this study, 49.2% of them were satisfied in their workplace while 50.8% of the nurses indicated they want to leave their workplace due to conditions of overwork and fatigue. The results of our study showed that the nurses' liking of children scores were very high (82.07 ± 16.35). There were not any significant differences between the pediatric nurses' scores with regard to personal factors such as workplace, age, parental status, employment status, or length of employment (P > 0.05). On the other hand, factors like marital status, frequency in changing of workplace, the number of children they cared for daily, their interest in following news related to children, and knowledge of children's games were determined to be significant (P < 0.05). Conclusion: Overall, pediatric nurses display a relatively high level of liking of children. Furthermore, this level correlates with personal factors such as marital status, workplace turnover, the number of children cared for daily, a knowledge of children's games, and the desire to follow news about children.

Keywords: Liking of children, nurse, children's hospital

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