COMPARING THE ETHICAL REASONING ABILITY OF UNDERGRADUATE AND MASTER NURSING STUDENTS OF ZANJAN UNIVERSITY OF MEDICAL SCIENCES: A DESCRIPTIVE-ANALYTICAL STUDY

Regarding the position of ethical principles in professions such as nursing, which provides care services and is related to the patient health, the need to address the nursing students' moral reasoning ability and its improvement, which leads to making ethical decisions in clinical situations, is revealed. Therefore, the present study aimed to compare the ethical reasoning ability of undergraduate and graduate nursing students of Zanjan University of Medical Sciences.

This was a descriptive -analytical study that was conducted at Zanjan University of Medical Sciences. The participants included 87 undergraduate nursing students and 46 master's students in nursing at Zanjan University of Medical Sciences who were selected by census sampling. The data was collected using the demographic characteristics questionnaire and the nursing dilemmas test (NDT). Descriptive statistics (number, percent, mean, standard deviation, and descriptive tables) and inferential statistics (t student, ANOVA, and Pearson correlation coefficient) were used regarding data analysis. Data was analyzed using SPSS Ver.16

The average ethical reasoning score of nursing master's students were 43.6±4.1 and undergraduate students was 40.6±5.1 and there is a significant difference between the moral reasoning of nursing undergraduate students and nursing master's students. It was also found that there is no significant relationship between the individual-social characteristics and the ethical reasoning ability of nursing students.

Findings showed that the moral reasoning ability of nursing master's students is higher compared to undergraduate students. The worrying finding is that the nursing students are not at the appropriate level of ethical reasoning. Nursing education policymakers should increase the ethical reasoning ability of nursing students in the field of solving ethical dilemmas by providing appropriate educational programs, including holding clinical ethics workshops in clinical environments, taking advantage of the experiences of experienced nurses, and using prominent ethics professors.