Abstract:

Background: Nurses' empathic tendencies influence their perceptions of individualized care. Objective: The study aims to determine the relationship between nursing students empathic tendencies and individualized care perceptions. Methods: This study employed a descriptive and correlational design the sample of the study consisted of 227 students enrolled in the nursing department of a state university in the fall semester of the 2020-2021 academic year. Data were collected with the Introductory Specifications Form, Empathic Tendencies Scale, Individualized Care Scale‐A‐Nurse Version. For the analysis, descriptive statistics, Student's t test, One-way analysis of variance Tukey and Pearson’s correlation were used. Results: It was determined that the students' total mean score on the Empathic Tendency Scale was 68.14 ± 8.52, and the average total score of the Individualized Care Scale-Nurse was 4.13 ± 0.56. Individualized Care Scale-Nurse subscale means were determined to be decision-making control (4.18 ± 0.63), clinical status (4.17 ± 0.59) and personal life status (3.98 ± 0.71), respectively. A weak positive correlation was found between the Empathic Tendency Scale and the Individualized Care Scale-Nurse (r = .396, p = .001). When the relationship between the Empathic Tendency Scale and the Individualized Care Scale-Nurse sub-dimensions was examined, there was a moderate positive (r =.413, p = .001), personal life situation sub-dimension (r =.283, p =.001) A weak positive correlation was found between the decision sub-dimension (r = .329, p = .001). Conlusion: In the study, empathic tendencies of nursing students are at medium level good individualized care perceptions It was determined that as the empathic tendencies of students increased, their individualized care perceptions increased.

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