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Liz Angel
Liz Angel is a Registered Nurse of twenty five years and has completed a Bachelor of Arts Hons (Psychology). She is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Positive Psychology and Education where her research focuses on educational psychology as it relates to student nurses. Her work focuses on the facilitation of international and domestic student nurse’s clinical practice. Her PhD is an investigation of the differences in motivations to choose nursing as a career and nursing self-concepts of international and domestic nursing students, with a particular emphasis on how these factors relate to students’ career retention plans.
Thesis Title
Motivating Factors Influencing Nursing as a Career Choice
Supervisors
Professor Rhonda Craven & Dr Nida Denson
Abstract
The primary purpose of the research is to compare and contrast cross-cultural groups of domestic and international student nurses in Australia in order to test the relations between ethnicity, age and gender with motivations to choose nursing as a career, nursing self-concepts, and retention plans. The research is comprised of three synergistic studies which aim to (a) test the reliability and psychometric properties of a newly developed measure of nurses’ motivation to undertake nursing and nursing self-concepts for the total sample, sub samples of students from culturally diverse backgrounds, and across age and gender; (b) examine for the total group, cross-culturally and across age and gender the relations between student nurses’: motivations to undertake nursing, nursing self-concepts and retention plans; and (c) elucidate student nurses’ perceptions of their motivations and self-concepts to undertake nursing based on interview data and explicate the extent to which these perceptions are similar and different cross-culturally. This will result in new research-identified solutions for developing effective recruitment strategies and educational interventions which facilitate all international and domestic nursing students to fulfil their career motivations and develop confident nursing self-concepts which will make a real difference in their intention to remain in nursing. The overall effect will be that the output of nurses from university courses will remain sufficient to maintain the workforce demands.
Publications
Angel, E., Craven, R. & Denson, N. (2011) The nurses’ self-concept instrument (SNCI): A comparison of domestic and international student nurses’ professional self-concepts from a large Australian University. Nurse Education Today.
