Nurse Educators' Perceptions of Nursing Students' Bullying Behaviors in Traditional and Online Education Settings: A Phenomenological Study

Inappropriate behavior is a top concern for nursing program committees. Bullying behaviors by nursing students can occur when the nurse educators in class or online are constantly questioned about nurse educator's knowledge. Nursing students' bullying behaviors can disrupt the learning process in class, having consequential aftereffects of psychological and physiological harm, retention of nursing students, and sentinel events. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of nurse educators' perceptions of nursing students bullying behaviors that occurred in clinical training, and traditional and online educational settings. Nursing educator responses to a semi-structured interview protocol provided insights of incidences of bullying behaviors that make it difficult for nursing students to progress in the nursing program, to acquire the necessary nursing skills, and to efficiently provide patient care due to stress. When bullying occurred, the students' health and patients' safety were at risk. The goal of this study was to enhance the literature lacking in studies relating to bullying in the professional nursing field. Based on the results the knowledge gained from this study should help increase full awareness of the bullying situation occurring in the nursing education settings. In addition, further recommendations were to incorporate utilizing social networking toolkit from the nursing students starting clinical rotation and various education levels of nurse educators from multiple nursing programs to reduce cyberbullying incivility. Another recommendation was to implement conduct policy and procedure to learn to identify and approach the bullying behavior situations to eliminate bullying behaviors. It is further recommended for future research to include a quantitative questionnaire survey utilizing the social networking toolkit by gathering data from first-year nursing students and various education levels of nurse educators from multiple nursing programs.