A STUDY OF THE IMAGE OF NURSE BY A PERSONALITY TEST

The purpose of this study was to explore some personality characteristics of the ideal nurse. 129 students served as subjects; 50 nursing school students engaging in nursing activity for one year or more (Experience group), 29 nursing school students having no experience of nursing (No experience group), and 50 students in prospective nursery school teacher course (Control group). Yatabe-Guilford personality inventory was administered twice under different instructions to measure the ideal nurse image and the subject's real self. In the first time the subjects were given a standard instruction for the inventory. In the second time they were asked to judge 120 items of the inventory on desirability-undesirability scale in relation to their ideal nurse image. From the data obtained, the mean number of the trait scores was calculated. The main results were as follows; (1) As for the ideal nurse image, Ex. group indicated significantly higher scores in S (Social Extraversion) and Ag (Lack of Agreeableness), and lower scores in T (Thinking Extraversion) and O (Lack of Objectivity) than the control group. No Ex. group showed higher scores in S, and lower scores in T than the control group. Ex. group showed lower scores in T and O than No Ex. group. (2) As for the real self, Ex. group and No Ex. group indicated higher scores in A (Ascendance) and Ag, and lower scores in I (Inferiority Feeling) than the control group. The former two groups did not differ from each other. (3) From analyses of the judges for each item in the inventory, the difference among three groups was found statistically significant in 14 items for the ideal nurse, and in 16 items for the real self