COVID-19 fear among junior undergraduate nursing students during the pandemic in South Africa

Health SA Gesondheid

 
 
Field Value
 
Title COVID-19 fear among junior undergraduate nursing students during the pandemic in South Africa
 
Creator Steenkamp, Ilze Chipps, Jennifer
 
Subject Nursing COVID-19; pandemic; nursing students; fear; clinical practical training
Description Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing students continued to work in facilities to complete clinical hours. Little was known about the impact of COVID-19 on nursing students during this time.Aim: To investigate fear of COVID-19 among junior undergraduate nursing students during the pandemic.Setting: A student nursing school at a university in the Western Cape, South Africa.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 559 nursing students. A self-administered questionnaire with the validated COVID-19 fear scale (α= 0.84) was distributed. Scale reliability, factor analysis, means and 95% confidence intervals were calculated for items, overall scale and associations with demographic variables were tested using Kruskal–Wallis Independent Samples and Mann–Whitney U tests.Results: There were 370 respondents (68.51% response rate), predominantly female (294, 79.5%) and exhibited a mean age of 21.9 years (± 3.9). More than half, 192 respondents (51.9%) reported mild fear of COVID-19, 103 (27.8%) moderate fear and 57 (15.4%) severe fear. Apart from gender, no significant demographic associations with overall COVID-19 fear were found. Factor analysis identified two distinct factors, physiological and emotional expressions of fear (moderate significant positive correlation between factors [r = 0.541]).Conclusion: The study’s findings reveal that junior undergraduate nursing students, during the pandemic, generally reported experiencing mild fear related to COVID-19.Contribution: This study contributes to the field of COVID-19 fear studies, provides insight into factors influencing fear levels and validates the scale’s factor structure.
 
Publisher AOSIS Publishing
 
Contributor n/a
Date 2023-11-30
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Survey
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/hsag.v28i0.2371
 
Source Health SA Gesondheid; Vol 28 (2023); 7 pages 2071-9736 1025-9848
 
Language eng
 
Relation
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https://hsag.co.za/index.php/hsag/article/view/2371/html https://hsag.co.za/index.php/hsag/article/view/2371/epub https://hsag.co.za/index.php/hsag/article/view/2371/xml https://hsag.co.za/index.php/hsag/article/view/2371/pdf
 
Coverage South Africa March 2021 mean age 22; 80% female
Rights Copyright (c) 2023 Ilze Steenkamp, Jennifer Chipps https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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