Autonomy Levels of Nursing Students

Abstract

Autonomy is one of the vocational criteria of the nursing profession and is essential for safe and quality care. Nurses begin to learn the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values associated with their professional roles during their school years. Nursing students should primarily have a high level of autonomy to protect and improve individuals’ health, and enhance their life quality in the future. This descriptive study was carried out with 285 nursing students to determine their autonomy levels. The study data were collected using a personal information form and the autonomy subscale (AS) of the Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale. For the analysis of the data, numbers, percentages, mean and standard deviation values, Mann-Whitney U, and Kruskal Wallis tests were employed, and the significance level was accepted as p <0.05. The mean total score of the students obtained from AS was 103.65 ± 18.34. Their scores from the subscales of AS were 42.68 ± 8.16 for “personal achievement”, 40.77 ± 7.70 for “freedom”, and 20.20 ± 4.70 for “enjoying loneliness”. The mean total score of the first-grade students was found to be higher than that of other grades, but the difference was not statistically significant (p> 0.05). The autonomy level of the students was found to be above the middle level, and the autonomy level of 1st-grade students was higher than that of the students in other grades.