Date of Award

December 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Nursing

First Advisor

Tracy Evanson

Abstract

Introduction: Child maltreatment is a global problem that causes harm to the well-being of a child that extends to adulthood. In the United States alone, there are 158,900 child victims in 2019 and 1,779 child fatalities. Despite national attention and the availability of child abuse education, the victimization statistics have remained essentially unchanged in the last 11 years. Nurses are mandated reporters of child maltreatment. School nurses are frequent observers in a child’s life, thus leaving them uniquely qualified for real-time assessment. The purpose of this study is to determine what factors correlate with the school nurse’s intent to report child maltreatment.

Specific Aim 1: To determine demographic (age, level of education, years of experience as a school nurse, location) frequencies of school nurses who work with child maltreatment. In addition, school nurses’ knowledge scores and attitudes toward reporting child maltreatment will be measured.Specific Aim 2: To determine significant differences in rural vs. non-rural school nurses’ knowledge scores, attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control toward the intent to report child maltreatment. Specific Aim 3: To determine the relationships among school nurses’ demographics, knowledge, attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control toward the intent to report child maltreatment. Hypothesis: Subjective Norms and Perceived Behavioral Control factors will significantly predict school nurses’ intent to report child maltreatment.

Methods: This study uses the Child Abuse Report Intention Scale (CARIS) (Feng & Wu, 2008) based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) to determine the school nurses’ intent to report child maltreatment. Four independent variables (predictors): knowledge, attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control are evaluated for correlation to the dependent variable, the intent to report child maltreatment through the survey tool. The participants were recruited from a randomized email sent to the National Association of School Nurses membership list. Data collection was achieved by developing a survey link through UND Qualtrics; this link was provided to the participants through email. The completed survey was analyzed using SPSS descriptive and correlational statistics to determine the outcomes related to the specific aims.

Results: This survey indicated that school nurses have Knowledge of Child Abuse and have appropriate Attitudes about Child Abuse and reporting. School nurses identified barriers to reporting as mainly time to report, the difficulty of the reporting process, lack of administrative report, fear of repercussions for the child and themselves, and lack of response or action by child protective services. Additionally, school nurses’ identified the need for additional education on the signs and symptoms of child maltreatment to be confident in reporting maltreatment that does not exhibit overt physical signs.

Download

Share

COinS