A study carried out by professors of the University of Valencia, the University of the Balearic Islands, the University of Huelva, and the University of Laussanne concludes that self-efficacy is a key component in nursing students, increasing during their first year of undergraduate education and turning out to be a temporal predictor of the resilience levels of these future professionals. The article was published in the journal Nurse Education in Practice and its sample was made out of students from both the Nursing Degree of the University of Valencia and the University of the Balearic Islands. It also concludes that self-efficacy is a basic competency within Nursing and thus, that it should be worked towards its development during undergraduate studies.
“The main conclusion that we can draw is that self-efficacy is at the base of the later development of different processes and abilities that are of the utmost importance to future nurses such as resilience, a variable which has been traditionally related with low dropout rates in the profession”, underscores Laura Galiana, professor at UV at the Department of Methodology for the Behavioral Sciences and first author of the paper. In this research, evidence was found of self-efficacy predicting the later levels of resilience in Nursing students and not vice-versa.
“What we have found in our study was that self-efficacy is of great importance for nursing students and prospective nurses, as not only is it a variable that defines the self-trust one puts in their ability to resolve problems in different contexts (including work) but also because we now know that it is a precedent for resilience. Matter of fact, by knowing a student’s self-efficacy levels during their first year in their undergraduate studies in Nursing, we can predict almost 20% of their resilience levels during their second year”, highlighted Noemí Sansó, professor at UIB at the Department of Nursing and corresponding author.
The study defines and measures self-efficacy in a general way, using the Genera Self-Efficacy Scale in its five-item format, being also the first article up to date to study its psychometric properties in its Spanish version while, at the same time, finding evidence of its usability in longitudinal studies. In this sense, the authors point out the importance of having quality measures that allow us to study different variables throughout undergraduate studies and the transversal competencies comprised within them such as, for example, the application of knowledge to problem-solving in the workplace.
The research team, headed by Laura Galiana and Noemí Sansó, main researchers of the project “Longitudinal research of Nursing Students’ Inner resources for Compassionate Care: Consequences for burnout, compassion fatigue and satisfaction, well-being and quality care (NurSInCC)” PID2022–139199OB-I00, funded in the 2022 call for Knowledge Generation Projects by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, aims to continue in the advancement of the study of internal resources for the development of more compassionate care and greater levels of professional quality of life and well-being in future nurses.
