Nurses social representation of their profession and professional practice

3^rd Euro Nursing & Medicare Summit

July 27-29, 2015 Valencia, Spain

Christine Roland-L�?©vy and Claude Marlette Mounguengui

University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Nurs Care

Abstract :

This presentation is about a comparative study between France and Gabon. It approaches what female nurses share of their profession and their professional practices. This study, with nurses (French: 103; Gabonese: 140), is based on the theory of social representations, with a free association task around the target term â�?�?nurseâ�?. It is completed by questions concerning the valence of each of the spontaneously produced terms. The participants were also asked to fill in 20 five point Likert-type scales measuring the type of behavior and relationship with their patients; this instrument covers two dimensions: the behavior focuses more on the relation with patients or more on the technical â�?�?taking care of â�?, with the same number of positive items and negative ones for each of the two dimensions. The data shows that both French and Gabonese nurses share in the center of the social representation of their profession the idea of â�?�?taking care of â�? (French: 70%; Gabonese 63.6%). But, what differs is that, for almost half of the Gabonese nurses, it is completed by the importance of â�?�?welcomingâ�? (46.4%) the patients, whereas for the French nurses it is followed by â�?�?listeningâ�? (29%), â�?�?empathyâ�? and â�?�?relationâ�? (for 23% of the nurses). Concerning their practice with patients, the Gabonese nurses obtain a higher score in favor of the relational dimension (Gabonese relational score=3.88; French relational score=2.74). These results will be discussed in terms of the social representations of the profession in connection to their professional practices.

Biography :

Christine Roland-Lévy has completed her PhD at la Sorbonne University in 1980. She then held a position of Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris Descartes for 20 years and now holds a tenured position as a full Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France. She published 50 papers in international academic journals. She is currently the President of the Consortium of French Psychology Associations, A-CIPA, and the President-Elect of the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP).

Email: Christine.Roland-Levy@univ-reims.fr