Abstract:

OBJECTIVE: The study was conducted to determine midwifery students’ considerations regarding the choice of profession, professional perspectives, professional motivation levels and the factors affecting their motivation. METHODS: The sample of this descriptive study comprised 220 first-, second-, third- and fourth-year students studying at the Department of Midwifery Faculty of Health Sciences of a state University. To collect data, the Personal Information Form questioning socio-demographic characteristics of the students and Motivation Sources and Problems Scale were used. To analyze the data, percentage distribution, analysis of variance (ANOVA), the Student's t-test, the Kruskal-Wallis, the Mann-Whitney U test, the Tukey test and Bonferroni-corrected Mann-Whitney U test were used. RESULTS: In this study, it was found of the students, 59.5% placed midwifery in their first 10 career choices, 47.3% chose it on their own will, 69.1% wanted to choose another profession, 74.5% considered the midwifery as an appropriate profession for themselves, 73.2% partially agreed to the community's point of view, 44.5% had partially positive view about midwifery before starting school, 75.5% had positive views about midwifery after starting school, and 66.8% considered midwifery as a difficult profession. In this study, the comparison of the students’ mean scores in terms of their school years revealed a statistically significant difference for intrinsic, negative and occupational learning motivation (p 0.05),but no difference for extrinsic motivation (p>;0.05). CONCLUSION: Students’ being in the first year of the school affected their professional motivation positively. It is recommended that students to start university education should be informed of the pros and cons of midwifery, that they should be motivated to choose a career which they consider as decent for themselves and that the fourth year students should be provided training about the professional motivation.

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