A Focused Ethnography of Undergraduate Nursing Students Who Are Using Motivational Interviewing

• Author / Creator

  Howard, Lisa M.

• With an increased focus in health care on lifestyle modification to reduce risk factors for non-communicable disease, nursing students would benefit from knowledge and skill in supporting clients with health behavior change. Nursing students receive content for health education but have limited exposure to using behavioral counselling skills. Motivational interviewing (MI) is a promising approach to increase pre-licensure students’ skill in the area of health behavior change. The majority of studies of MI attend to measuring its effect on health management behaviors while the research on teaching MI focuses on licensed health professionals. There is little research on teaching students MI and no inquiry including in the perspectives of students, clients and instructors.
  The purpose of this project was to understand how undergraduate nursing students learn and apply MI in the clinical setting, and to determine the salient features from the perspectives of key participants in the learning environment: students, instructors and clients. A focused ethnography was employed to extend the understanding of how a theoretically based collaborative approach could be learned by baccalaureate nursing students and applied in a clinical setting.
  The product of the inquiry is a cultural description of key domains associated with teaching students a relational skill, motivational interviewing, and integrating that skill into a collaborative partnership. All features in the domains are supported with literature, yet many of these features – such as using MI in a collaborative partnership or transforming through experiencing MI – have not been previously described. Issues were raised regarding the processes of learning motivational interviewing to be addressed by educators, clinicians and researchers.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Motivational interviewing

• Graduation date

  Fall 2015

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3NC5SJ3K

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.