Educating ethics codes by lecture or role-play; which one improves nursing students' ethical sensitivity and ethical performance more? A quasi-experimental study.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Promoting ethical and professional principles through education is the major way to build and maintain people's trust in the nursing. However, despite remarkable efforts in this area, sensitivity to these principles and their application in clinical practice remain low. PURPOSE: This study aimed to compare the effect of educating codes of nursing ethics through methods of role-playing and lecture on the Ethical Sensitivity and Ethical Performance of nursing students. METHODS: A single-blinded quasi-experimental study conducted on 114 nursing students of Urmia University of medical sciences, which recruited using convenience sampling and assigned to two groups of intervention (role-paly and lecture) and one group of control, so that the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-semester nursing students were allocated to the control, role-play and lecture groups, respectively. Data were collected using the Nurses' Ethical Performance Questionnaire (EPQ) and the Lutzen's Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire (MSQ) at three time-points of before, immediately after, and two months after the intervention. The same educational content was provided for both intervention groups, so that the role-play group received the intervention over an eight-day period and the lecture group received it in five sessions. RESULTS: The results showed there was a significant difference in the mean scores of ethical sensitivity and ethical performance between the three groups immediately (p < .001) and two months after the intervention (p < .001), so the mean scores were significantly higher in the role-play and lecture groups compared to the control group after the intervention (p < .001). In addition, after the intervention, the mean scores of ethical sensitivity and ethical performance in the role-play group were higher than the lecture group (p < .001). CONCLUSION: Educating codes of ethics by role-playing method had a greater positive effect on the promotion of the ethical sensitivity and ethical performance compared to the lecture.