Becoming a Nurse: A Selective View

Hans O. Mauksch
Additional contact information
Hans O. Mauksch: Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Previously

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1963, vol. 346, issue 1, 88-98

Abstract: The young woman who enters a school of nursing is not only exposed to planned educational experiences but also to informal reality factors which profoundly shape her development. A shift from ego to role emphasis can be ex pected in the context of round-the-clock concern with profes sional conduct. The development of defensive mechanisms is stimulated by the stress of concurrent exposure to classroom and practice. Rapidly imposed adulthood, the reality of the human body, the modification of privacy and modesty seem to hit harder than the more dramatic but expected experiences with death. Caution, also, is learned when childhood dreams give way to patients' actual responses to nursing care and when the novice experiences the conflicts and stresses within the social organization of patient care. The development of a single-sex, quasi-isolated, close-knit student community adds to the role self-consciousness. The young woman entering nurs ing is a person desirous of being with people and of helping people but is also anxious to avoid blame and failure-producing situations. She seeks safe and controlled conditions within which to be with people. The effect of the total experience may be at variance with the objectives of the school and the profession. Consideration should be given to the character istics of the novice, the social context of the learning process, and the trends and aims of the profession.

Date: 1963
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271626334600109 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:346:y:1963:i:1:p:88-98

DOI: 10.1177/000271626334600109

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().