The development and testing of the Nursing Student Perceptions of Dishonesty Scale
Section snippets
Background
Academic dishonesty, the intentional deception in relation to academic work of either one's self or of others (Gaberson, 1997), continues to concern faculty in higher education. In a survey of 50,000 undergraduates 70% of students reported engaging in some form of academic dishonesty while attending college (McCabe, 2005a). Specifically, one quarter report cheating on tests, and half report cheating on written assignments (McCabe, 2005a, McCabe, 2005b). Nursing students are no exception (Aaron
Methods
There have been several theories used to better understand academic dishonesty. After reviewing theories such as rational choice, individual net benefit maximization, and planned behavior, we believed that none of these theories applied well to both academic and clinical learning situations. Sykes and Matza (1957) describes five techniques used to rationalize behavior: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemner, and appeal to higher
Results
We sent emails to the nursing deans and program directors of 702 AACN accredited traditional baccalaureate programs. Of the deans and directors who forwarded the email, 1542 students began taking the survey with 1358 students meeting inclusion criteria (enrolled in a clinical course). Of those, 973 students progressed to answering the survey questions therefore making them usable cases for analysis. Because of possible responder bias, two of the 973 cases identified strongly agree for all 90
Discussion
The strong factor loadings for both clinical and classroom factors suggest that there are distinct categories of different behaviors considered dishonest. The internal consistency of the factors (alphas) were mostly good or excellent, although test file (acceptable) and stealing (poor) are lower than desirable (Polit and Beck, 2012) partly because these factors contained only three items each. Work needs to be conducted to further develop these subscales. Equally, the high alpha values could be
Conclusion
We developed this instrument for faculty and researchers to learn what behaviors nursing students perceive as dishonest in both the classroom and clinical settings. This information can be used to develop more specific honor codes and policies as well as individualized interventions such as educational modules to reduce the amount of engagement in dishonest behaviors by nursing students.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a research grant from the Ohio Nurses Foundation and a Gerstacker-Gund Faculty Development grant from Hiram College.
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