Clark and Springer (2007) conducted a qualitative study to examine the perceptions of faculty and students in a nursing program on incivility. Their key questions were:

 

• How do nursing students and nurse faculty members contribute to incivility in nursing education?
• What are some of the causes of incivility in nursing education?
• What remedies might be effective in preventing or reducing incivility?

 

They gathered responses from online surveys with open-ended questions from 36 nurse faculty and 168 nursing students. Each of the researchers reviewed all comments and organized them by themes. They noted four major themes of responses:

 

• Faculty perceptions of in-class disruption and incivility by students
• Faculty perceptions of out-of-class disruption and incivility by students
• Student perceptions of uncivil behaviors by faculty
• Faculty and student perceptions of possible causes of incivility in nursing education

 

A total of eight sub-themes were identified among the faculty comments on types of in-class disruptions. Those subthemes were:

 

• Disrupting others by talking in class
• Making negative remarks/disrespectful comments toward faculty
• Leaving early or arriving late
• Using cell phones
• Sleeping/not paying attention
• Bringing children to class
• Wearing immodest attire
• Coming to class unprepared

Reference

 

Clark, C. M., & Springer, P. J. (2007). Thoughts on incivility: Student and faculty perceptions of uncivil behavior. Nursing Education Perspectives, 28(2), 93-97.

 

 

Assignment Directions

 

Imagine that you have replicated the Clark and Springer (2007) study with psychology students from an on-campus undergraduate program (all face-to-face classes). The faculty members are describing students they have in their psychology classes.

 

You have organized responses from the 15 faculty who responded regarding in-class disruptions.

 

Because this qualitative research study involves human subjects, the researcher must consider the potential ethical issues involved in conducting the study. The researcher should consider the following things:

 

• The potential researcher/participant and participant/participant interactions involved in the study.
• The potential ethical issues surrounding the researcher/participant and participant/participant interactions involved in the study.
• How to mitigate both the ethical issues and harm to individuals and institutions.

 

Preliminary Analysis

 

Complete the following steps to use the SPSS data file (Faculty Comments Dataset.sav) to do some initial analyses of the data:

 

1. Open the SPSS data file.
2. In DATA VIEW, notice that columns 1 and 2 contain the comments that were collected. Also note that column 2 contains a place to enter the numerical code for each theme into which that comment would fall. Columns 3-5 contain each faculty respondent’s ID code, gender code (1=male, 2= female), and number of years teaching, respectively.
3. In VARIABLE VIEW, notice how the codes for gender are entered under the VALUES column. You will use the same method to enter the codes for the comment themes for the second variable. You will want to review the videos located in both the topic materials and in the General Guidelines of the assignment for information on how to do this. Also, note that to the far right in VARIABLE VIEW, under MEASURES, the proper scale of measurement needs to be entered for each variable. Only years of teaching is a scale (continuous) variable. All the others are codes/qualitative.

 

Coding the Comments and Examining the Frequencies of Each Theme

 

Column 1 contains brief summaries of the different comments that were collected from the 15 faculty (some faculty gave more than one comment). Code the comments (Hint: generally, look for the same themes that Clark and Springer found, but add anything that may be new or do not include a theme that does not fit your set of comments) by completing the following steps:

 

1. Assign each type of comment a number code (e.g., talking during class = 1; disrespectful = 2; etc.).
2. Put the code of each comment in the column headed FACULTYCOMMENTCODE just to the right of the comment (that is, it should be in the same row as the comment).

Next, enter the code values and meaning of each code. You will want to review the videos located in both the topic materials and in the General Guidelines of the assignment for information on how to do this. Complete the following steps to enter the code values and meaning of each code:

 

1. Switch to VARIABLE VIEW.
2. Go to the row for the second variable.
3. Look under VALUES, and enter the code value and the meaning of each code. For example, Value box = 1; Label box = Talking during class. Then, click “Add” so the label shows in the box below. Then, put the next code value (2) in the Value box, its meaning in the Label box, and click “Add.” Continue this until all code values and labels are showing in the larger box.
4. When finished, click “OK.”

 

Now, analyze the frequencies of comments in each theme. You will want to review the videos located in both the topic materials and in the General Guidelines of the assignment for information on how to do this. Complete the following steps to analyze the frequencies of comments in each theme:

 

1. Go to AnalyzeàDescriptive StatisticsàFrequencies.
2. Select FACULTYCOMMENTCODE and move it to the box on the right (Variables). The “Display Frequency Tables” box should be checked.
3. Use data in the SPSS data file to create a bar graph by selecting Chart and then choosing bar graph. Be sure to have the graph show the frequency of each type of response. Note: you can also display the percentage of all comments that fell into that category.

 

Submit the output tables and graphs with your summary write-up as described below.

 

 

 

Here is an example of this kind of output using a different, but similar, set of data: