Today's Falsehood, Tomorrow’s Immoral Actions: A Causal Modeling of Relationship between Locus of Control and Academic Dishonesty with Mediation Role of Academic Self-concept among Nursing College Students

Despite the upward literature in ethical behavior of nurses, little attention has been given to the importance of the academic dishonesty behaviors. This conflict puts higher education institutions and faculty members to face new problems, because they don't know how to guarantee the academic integrity. Hence, present research examined the role of academic self-concept meditation in relation to locus of control and academic dishonesty in a form of a structural model. The sample of this research was 298 nursingstudents of the Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences. The structural equation modeling was used to analyze the relationship between the components. Moreover, to collect data, locus of control, academic self-concept and academic dishonesty scales were used; and also, their validity and reliability were confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis method and Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Additionally, SPSS and AMOS software's version 22 were used for analyses data. As the results revealed that academic self-concept fully mediated the relationship between internal locus of control and external locus of control, the internal locus of control was a positive predictor and external locus of control was a significant negative predictor of academic self-concept. Furthermore, academic self-concept decreased academic dishonesty. In addition, there was a direct effect of internal locus of control and external locus of control on academic dishonesty. It means these findings had practical and experiential benefits for researchers; these concepts help them to analyze and decrease the academic dishonesty in clinical and academic environments among nursing.