Investigation of nursing senior students' perceptions of locus of control and readiness for practice

In this research, The study was carried out in two stages as methodological and descriptive in order to determine the nursing senior students' perceptions of locus of control and readiness for practice. At the methodological stage, the adaptation of the Casey-Fink Readiness for Practice Survey into Turkish, and the validity and reliability study were conducted online via Google forms. The sample of this stage (not included in the second stage) consisted of 179 senior nursing students from three universities in Ankara. In the descriptive stage; the Casey-Fink readiness for practice survey was used which was made validty and reliability in order to determined nursing senior students' locus of control and readiness for pratice perceptions. The sample consisted of 301 senior nursing students from nursing departments across Turkey, who were reached by snowball sampling method. The data obtained from the research were evaluated using the SPSS 22.0 Windows package program. At the methodological stage in the evaluation of the data; descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, explanatory factor analysis, structural equation model, Cronbach alpha coefficient, descriptive stage; descriptive statistics, Kolmogrov – Smirnov, Mann Whitney U test, Kruskal Wallis test and Spearman correlation coefficient were used. According to the research findings, the Casey-Fink Readiness for Practice Scale's which it was determined to be a valid and reliable scale for our country was found with a single 15-items sub-dimension as Cronbach's alpha value of 0,881. In the descriptive stage of the study, the students' locus of control levels were found to be internal locus of control (median=121), and their perceptions of readiness for practice were found to be moderate (median=2,93). A positive and low-level significant correlation of 0,240 was found between the scores of the Locus of Control Scale and the Casey-Fink Readiness for Practice Scale of the senior nursing students. According to the research results, it is recommended to be repeated with a larger sample group who completed all clinical practices face-to-face after the Covid-19 breakout ended for the validity and reliability of which was determined the scale. Then it is recommended be investigated nursing senior students' locus of control and readiness for practice with quantitative and qualitative studies of different variables affecting them.