Student nurses' views on the usefulness of psychology

It has been said for a long time that psychology is very important and useful for nursing. And, due to specialization in medicine and aging of society, the importance and usefulness of psychological knowledge for the nurses have increased even more. However, it has not been made clear what sort of psychological knowledge is useful for nursing process and what ought to be taught in the lectures on psychology in the nursing school. In this paper, 173 student nurses rated the usefulness of 75 major propositions of psychology. The results revealed that especially the areas of motivation, consciousness, physiological psychology, and clinical psychology were recognized as very useful, although all areas of psychology taken up in this research were rated as useful. The results also revealed that these areas could be classified into 5 factors, that is, basic psychology, understanding of human behavior, understanding of mental condition, understanding of matters directly related to medicine, and cognition. It is expected that these results are taken into account so that the lectures on psychology are useful for the nurses.