Knowledge and Attitude towards Nursing Profession among Adolescent Students of Sikkim

The investigators assessed the knowledge and attitude of adolescent students in the school of urban and rural community. Investigator adopted the non experimental survey approach with descriptive comparative research design where 30 students from the schools of each community were selected who were within 14-19 years of age group belonging to the selected schools of rural and urban community of Sikkim studying in 11th and 12th class , who have taken commerce, science or arts as the stream of study in the academic session of 2012-2013 and who were willing to participate in the study and present at the time of data collection were included in the study. A probability cluster sampling technique was used for the selection of the district and schools from urban and rural community of Sikkim, and probability simple random sampling technique was used for the selection of the adolescent students from the selected schools of urban and rural community, Sikkim. .Validated structured questionnaire and attitude scale was used to collect the data to see the knowledge and attitude of students and compare the relationship and association. The finding of the study reveals that the knowledge of urban school students (352) found to be better than the knowledge of rural school students (319). However, the attitude score of adolescent students of urban school was lower than the rural school student. The study also revealed that there is an inverse relationship between knowledge and attitude of urban community (P<0.05) but no relationship found between knowledge and attitude in rural community (P>0.05). Regarding the association of knowledge with selected factors, it was seen with gender and stream of study in rural community and with religion in urban community as seen by x2 value (P<0.05). On the contrary, the association of attitude was seen with the gender in urban community whereas no association was seen in rural community with any selected factors. These findings have important implication for the recruitment of adolescent students into nursing.