Approachability of Nursing Clinical Instructors: Psychometric Assessment of a Scale Development

• Main Author: Collier, Angela
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University 2017
• Subjects: approachability; clinical education; clinical effectiveness; student; teacher; Nursing
• Online Access: https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3350; https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4762&context=etd

Approachability of nursing clinical instructors is largely unknown and misunderstood, yet critical for millennial students which currently comprise 82% of nursing students (National League for Nursing, 2014). Nursing education consists of both a didactic and a clinical component. Clinical education is dynamic and allows the student an experiential learning opportunity. Therefore, clinical nursing educators are vitally important. Approachability has been identified in many studies as a leading characteristic of an effective instructor. Although the importance of approachability of the instructor is established, currently no scale exists to measure this concept. The purpose of this study was to examine the validity and reliability of the newly developed Approachability of Nursing Clinical Instructor (ANCI) scale. Based on the results of this study, the newly developed ANCI scale meets all four aspects of validity (face, content, construct and criterion-related) and reliability is established. The confirmatory analysis indicated a one-factor scale with 56.102 of the variance explained. There are multiple future recommendations for the ANCI scale which include further psychometric testing the new scale, potential theory testing, education and screening of new clinical instructors and expanding the ANCI within nursing and to other disciplines.