Developing Strategies to Overcome Challenges Faced by Postgraduate Nursing Students

Abstract

Context: Improvement of postgraduate experience makes students adopt strategies to overcome challenges encountered to obtain the intended postgraduate degree certificate.

Aim:  To investigate challenges faced by postgraduate nursing students, develop strategies for overcoming these challenges, and assessing face and content validity for the proposed strategies.

Methods: The study was carried out at the Faculty of Nursing at Ain Shams University using a methodological design. The sample consisted of two groups, namely postgraduate nursing students including all master and doctorate postgraduate students in different specialties at the last semester of their studies during the academic year 2017/2018; their total number was 236 students and a Jury group (25 professors and assistant professors from different nursing faculties). Three tools were used to achieve the aim of this study. They were a self-administered questionnaire for students to investigate challenges faced during their studies, an opinionnaire sheet to examine the face and content validity of the developed questionnaire, and an opinionnaire sheet to validate the proposed strategies.

Results: The student-related challenges revealed that the psychological-related challenges had the highest mean (2.5±0.4) among the student-related challenges, while the financial-related had the lowest mean (2.2±0.5). The administrative and academic challenges were the most challenging, with a mean (2.2±0.5) for the institutional-related challenges.

Conclusion: Based on the identified challenges and their prioritization, overcoming strategies were developed and were found to have high levels of the face, and content validity by experts' opinions and Content Validity Indicator CVI was (0.99). The study recommended that the developed strategies should be presented to and discussed with postgraduate students in the study setting to improve and ensure their acceptability.