PERSONAL VALUES OF FIRST YEAR STUDENTS IN NURSING, OCCUPATIONAL THERAPIST, PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT, AND PHYSICAL THERAPIST EDUCATION PROGRAMS

Horbacewicz J.¹, Seifried E.¹, Tooker J.¹, Whitlow S.¹

¹Touro College, Physical Therapy, New York, United States

Background: Values shape the way one looks at the world and provide a framework from which one can make decisions. When personal values are consistent with the values of a given profession healthcare practitioners are more successful and patient satisfaction increases. Little is known about the values students entering healthcare fields possess upon admission. Establishing a base line of these values can provide data on the type of person who enters these professions and enable longitudinal data to be generated regarding the effectiveness of an educational program in influencing those values. It can also facilitate future interprofessional collaborations.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine a baseline for the personal values of students entering nursing, occupational therapy (OT), physician assistant (PA) and physical therapy (PT) fields.

Methods: 106 PA ( 31M, 75F), 65 PT (37M,28F), 23 OT (4M, 19F) and 19 Nursing (7M,12F) first year students filled out the Rokeach Values Survey (RVS) during their first semester of classes. The RVS measured subjects’ hierarchical arrangement of two kinds of personal values, 18 terminal values and 18 instrumental values. Data was analyzed at the .05 level of significance utilizing IBM SPSS Version 21©. Descriptive statistics summarized demographic information. The mean ranking of each of the 18 terminal and 18 instrumental values was calculated. A Kruskal-Wallis test was conducted to evaluate differences in distribution among the students in the different programs. Post-hoc Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted to evaluate pair wise differences among the groups.

Results: Two terminal values, Health and Family Security, and one instrumental value, Honest, had the highest mean rank for all four programs. In addition, two terminal values, World of Beauty and National Security, and two instrumental values, Obedience and Imaginative, had the lowest mean rank for all four programs. Results of the Kruskal–Wallis revealed no significant difference in a majority of the mean rankings on the RVS between students from the different programs (p > 0.05). There was a significant effect of Group on Value for five of the values. Four were terminal values and one was an instrumental value. For terminal values, there was a significant difference for Equality between Nursing and PA (p=0.022) and Nursing and OT (p=0.007), National Security between OT and Nursing (p=0.026), Self-Respect between PT and OT (p=0.012), and as well as True Friendship between PT and OT (p=0.040). For instrumental values, there was a significant difference (p=0.027) when comparing the ranking of Ambition between PA’s and OT’s.

Conclusion(s): First year Nursing, OT, PA and PT students share similar personal values when ranking from most important to least important. There was a general theme of values associated with benevolence being rated highest by all programs. Most differences were found in end-state or desired goals (terminal values) rather than the mode of conduct (instrumental values) to achieve these goals.

Implications: Many of the same values ranked highly by students are seen in their respective profession’s core values. This suggests that people may choose careers in which personal values are in line with those of their prospective profession.

Funding acknowledgements: None

Topic: Education

Ethics approval: The research was approved by the Touro College School of Health Sciences IRB.

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