Attidutes of Nursing Students towards Reading Habits: A Vacational School Sample

Aim: Considering the fact that it allows individuals to improve and enhance the knowledge, skills and understanding that they obtain throughout their lives and, at the same time, to adapt these values to individual and social life, reading habit is thought to contribute to nursing students and therefore to nursing profession, whose subject is human. Thus, this study was planned to determine the attitudes of the students of a health school of nursing towards reading habits.

Method: A socio-demographic information questionnaire and “the Attitude Scale towards Reading Habit” developed by Gömleksiz (2004) were used in the study. Data were analyzed through percentage, frequency, analysis of variance (ANOVA), Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis statistical tests.

Results: It was found that 75.3% of the students were female, 78.9 % of the students read novels and story type books.

Conclusions: It was found that nursing students read for personal development; they preferred novels and stories; female students had more positive attitudes about reading than male students; the father’s level of education affected attitudes towards reading habit; but the mother’s level of education, previous location of residence and financial income did not affect attitudes towards reading habit and, in general, attitudes about reading habit were affected in a positive way in later years of study.