Educational Purgatory; a Qualitative Study into the Main Barriers to the Formation of Professional Identity among Nursing Students

Professional identity is a form of social identity and an important outcome of nursing education programs. The formation of professional identity is the evolutionary process of maturity which begins before entering nursing and develops after graduation. Despite the importance of professional identity to the development of nursing, the barriers to its formation have not yet been identified. The aim of this study was to explore the barriers to the formation of professional identity among bachelor’s nursing students.
This was a qualitative conventional content analysis, in which 32 bachelor’s nursing students were recruited purposively from three universities of medical sciences located in Tehran, Iran. Unstructured interviews were conducted for data collection. The data were analyzed by the qualitative content analysis approach and through constant comparison analysis.
The educational purgatory was extracted from five sub-themes. The sub-themes included: compulsory choice and continuation of nursing, feeling of educational failure, contradiction between expectations and realities, stereotypical images of nurses, and low social status of nursing. These themes reflected the barriers to the formation of professional identity among bachelor’s nursing students.
The study findings suggest nursing students’ frustration and disinterest in nursing which have turned studying nursing into a purgatory for them. The findings of the present study can help nursing policy makers develop strategies for removing barriers to and facilitating nursing students’ professional identity formation.