Anxiety and categorisation effects in student nurses' attitudes towards young and older patients: A dual pathway model
Section snippets
Age as a Social Category
Age is an important dimension on which we categorise others as well as ourselves (North and Fiske, 2012). In fact, age has been proposed as the most important dimension of interpersonal categorisation (Jönson, 2013). Although multiple stereotypes of older people exist which become salient in different contexts, overall attitudes towards older people tend to be negative (Adams-Price and Morse, 2009, Jönson, 2013). In fact, Liu et al. (2013) argued that healthcare professionals are particularly
Intergroup Anxiety
One variable that could further affect nurses' attitudes towards their patients is intergroup anxiety. Intergroup anxiety is a type of anxiety that people experience when anticipating or engaging in intergroup interaction (Stephan, 2014, Stephan and Stephan, 1985). It refers to negative outcome expectancies - e.g., fear of negative evaluations, or fear of being misunderstood (Bousfield and Hutchison, 2010, Vorauer et al., 2000). Research has shown that intergroup anxiety leads to more negative
Nursing Education in the Netherlands
This study was conducted among a sample of student nurses in the Netherlands. These students were enrolled in a school for higher vocational education, which prepares students during a four-year educational programme for a professional career as a nurse. The education combines theory with practical experience acquired during various internships, which start in the second year of the programme. Students are qualified upon completion to work in all EU member states in, e.g., psychiatric or mental
Participants
A total of 108 student nurses participated in this study. Although there is no universally agreed boundary to define ‘young’ students, in this study we used an age range of 16–30. As a result, four people were omitted from further analyses (aged 32, 43, 44, and 48)1, leaving 104 students as the final sample (Mage = 21.58, SD = 2.22; 93 women).
Design
We employed a between-subjects design with two
Manipulation Check
The reported (estimated) age of the patient was analysed in an analyses of variance with experimental condition (patient age) as independent variable. A significant effect indicated that the manipulation was successful, F(1, 101) = 1950.96, p < .001, ηp2 = .95. Participants in the young patient condition indicated thinking of a much younger person (M = 22.60, SD = 4.26) than those in the older patient condition (M = 79.57, SD = 8.25). Moreover, the mean age of these patients fell clearly within the intended
Discussion
The aim of this study was to investigate a dual pathway model to explain the effect of patients' age on student nurses' attitudes towards their patients. Based on the fact that older patients constitute a double outgroup whereas young patients share the same age category with student nurses, we expected and found that attitudes towards older patients were more negative than those towards young patients. However, also as expected, older patients were found to elicit less anxiety compared to
Conclusion
Young student nurses generally have more negative attitudes towards older patients than towards younger patients. A reluctance to work with older patients is therefore a growing concern in geriatric care. The current study, however, showed that there is hope yet. Although student nurses are expected to be somewhat anxious in dealing with patients due to their relative inexperience, they showed less anxiety towards older patients compared to younger patients. As such, older people may be
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