I am setting up this blog in order to try to get some input into the Question with which I will focus my Masters Thesis. I would appreciate any help you can give me as I am having a bit of difficulty trying to decide how to term my question. I am very interested in Passion and Nursing Students, more specifically, how Nursing students experience passion in nursing school and what contributes to that. My initial question was:
What is it that Inspires Nursing Students to become Passionate about Nursing?
This didnt really work out very well for me as when I started doing a literature search I came up with many articles that discussed Inspiration in the context of Chest assessments! Nursing obviously had a different meaning for "inspiration" than what I intended. So I thought about changing my question and it evolved into
What is it that Motivates Nursing students to become Passionate about Nursing?
I do like this question better. However, I am still struggling with this and unsure where to go from here. The literature has still been very difficult as I am coming up with little to nothing. There are not any studies that I have been able to find that ask Nursing students how they become inspired to be passionate. I have had some discussion with my supervisor and she has encouraged me in a few different ways. One way is to do a concept analysis of what PASSION means. One definition that I have found is from the Merriam Webster Dictionary website. The definition is "a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object or concept". Of course this is only one definition, I have many others aspects of passion to explore but I do think this is a good starting place.
However I am still very concerned about the fact that I can not find any literature regarding my topic. I am wondering then if I should change my question and take out passion. The question would look like this:
What is it that motivates nursing students to become enthusiastic about nursing?
However, when I did a literature search last night replacing passion with enthusiasm, I really did not come up with anything more! Ouch! I am not really sure how to do a literature review when very little is available. So now I am considering to changing it again. I am wondering about changing it completely and focus on something else. But I just don't want to admit defeat and I still like the idea of studying passion with nursing students. So I am thinking of changing it to something like this:
What experiences do nursing students feel contribute to feeling passionate (could substitute enthusiasm) about nursing?
Then a sub question could be:
What are the barriers nursing students experience that prevent them from feeling passionate (or enthusiastic) about nursing?
I am hoping that I will be able to get some feedback from everyone about what they think about my question. Also, what do you think of my topic? Do you think that I am missing something here?
My whole premise of my thesis question is based on human resources and the rentention of nurses. I feel like if we can understand what inspired nursing students when they were in nursing, we could use this information to develop mentorship programs that would enhance and foster those feelings they made have had in nursing school.
What do you think?
