Abstract

Professional nursing organizations and nursing education credentialing agencies describe accountability as an essential attribute underpinning professional practice. Although accountability is foundational to nursing practice, little is known about how nurse educators teach accountability. The purpose of this qualitative research was to understand and describe socially constructed meanings nurse educators attribute to the phenomenon of teaching accountability. This study brought out of concealment the real-world teaching experiences of nurse educators. Participants (n=6) were nurse educators who taught accountability in baccalaureate academic classrooms. Data collection occurred via face-to-face semi-structured interviews. An interpretive phenomenological design was utilized throughout data collection and analysis, resulting in the emergence of eight central themes. Study findings revealed a web of meanings attributed to teaching accountability. Participants described divergent viewpoints about accountability; i.e., accountability is core and inherent while simultaneously being both vague and intangible. Participants described four main types of unaccountable student behaviors and predicted connections between student unaccountability and future nursing practice unaccountability. Simultaneously, participants reported uncertainty about when accountability was taught. These conflicting meanings influenced the experiences of both explicit and hidden accountability education within baccalaureate nursing curricula.

Description

This dissertation has also been disseminated through the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. Dissertation/thesis number: 3512963; ProQuest document ID: 1024564212. The author still retains copyright.

Author Details

Lorretta C. Krautscheid, PhD, MS, RN, CNE

Sigma Membership

Omicron Upsilon

Type

Dissertation

Format Type

Text-based Document

Study Design/Type

Phenomenology

Research Approach

Qualitative Research

Keywords:

Accountability Education, Learning Theory Application, Professional Development, Nursing Faculty

Advisor

Jeanette Hartshorn

Second Advisor

Susan Luparell

Third Advisor

Eric Wellington

Degree

PhD

Degree Grantor

Capella University

Degree Year

2012

Rights Holder

All rights reserved by the author(s) and/or publisher(s) listed in this item record unless relinquished in whole or part by a rights notation or a Creative Commons License present in this item record.

All permission requests should be directed accordingly and not to the Sigma Repository.

All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.

Review Type

None: Degree-based Submission

Acquisition

Proxy-submission

Date of Issue

2023-08-21

Full Text of Presentation

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