This chapter covers the design and mechanisms of the study. Firstly, the research framework and hypotheses are explained in terms of their cultivation and design. The methodology is then laid out with relation to the participants involved, the instrument used, and the data collection and analysis processes.
Research Framework
The framework for this study was designed in accordance with the research purpose and literature review. The purpose of this study is to investigate predictors of ICS in nursing students along the Gulf Coast. These predictors are divided into four X variables: community setting, prior exposure, gender, and intended work setting. These variables are to be tested against the Y variable of ICS which is comprised of five domains: interaction engagement, respect for cultural differences, interaction confidence, interaction enjoyment, and interaction attentiveness. Figure 3.1 illustrates the research framework.
26 Figure 3.1 Research Framework
Research Hypotheses
Based on the purpose of the study and the research questions, the following hypotheses seek to explain the relationship between the variables gender, community setting, prior exposure, and intended work setting with the intercultural sensitivity levels of nursing students.
H1: Students from an urban or metropolitan background have higher levels of ICS than students from rural areas.
H2: Prior cultural exposure has a positive influence on students’ levels of ICS.
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H2-1: Cultural immersion experience has a positive influence on students’
levels of ICS.
H2-2: Cross-narrative experience has a positive influence on students’
levels of ICS.
H2-3: Language study has a positive influence on students’ levels of ICS.
H3: Female students have a higher ICS levels than their male counterparts.
H4: Students intending to work in urban areas or large cities have higher levels of ICS than students seeking employment in rural areas.
Research Method
Based on material in the literature, advice from subject matter experts, and consultations from professors this study was designed to use a quantitative approach for testing the hypotheses.
Appropriate participants were selected in accordance with the research purpose. A survey instrument was designed based on the literature and can be found in Appendix A.
Research Procedure
This study follows a ten step guide for conducting the research. The steps are as follows:
1. Read literature for gaps or anomalies in a particular field to identify a research problem.
2. Define research objectives to serve as the basis of the study.
3. Review relevant literature to gain greater expertise on the topic.
4. Build research framework.
5. Through using the literature, obtaining advice, and adapting available instruments, create a questionnaire for use in the present study.
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6. Run a pilot study to analyze the reliability of the instrument and adjust as needed.
7. Run the main study.
8. Analyze data and test hypotheses.
9. Discuss findings.
10. Specify implications of study and provide further research recommendations.
Sample
The participants of this study were nursing students in the Gulf Coast region of the United States. There were five schools in this study offering either an Associate’s Degree in Nursing (ADN) or a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing (BSN). The students were attending schools that will prepare them for the licensing exams to become Registered Nurses. These two types of nursing degrees were chosen for this study because they make up about 90% of nurses employed in northwest Florida which is the majority of the research area. (Florida Center for Nursing, 2012) This study looked at nursing schools offering these degrees along the Gulf Coast Region consisting of 121 participants.
Sample Descriptive Statistics
In this study, the instrument was distributed to five nursing programs along the Gulf Coast region resulting in 121 completed surveys. Firstly, the deans or the equivalent administrative personnel of each institution were contacted to solicit participation. After obtaining permission to conduct the study, the researcher then fulfilled the research participation requirements for each institution such as providing letters of intent, samples of the instrument, and assurances of data collection privacy and security. The instrument was then uploaded to a professional survey distribution website, and a secure URL was sent to each institution’s lead point of contact (POC) for the project. The POC in turn distributed the link to the student bodies via their internal and/or private email lists. This was done to protect the security of the student’s online contact information.
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Each nursing program averaged 40 to 50 enrolled students, putting the number of participants in the sample at approximately 250 students. This brought the response rate of the sample to 48%. The instrument collected ICS scores, background data, prior cultural exposure, and demographic data which queried age, gender, and highest level of education. Among the respondents, 77% were female, the majority of whom are in their mid to late twenties. Of the respondents 48% acknowledged holding a two year associate’s degree, 36% holding a high school diploma, 14% holding a four year bachelor’s degree, and 1% holding a Ph.D. Among the 121 respondents, there were 31% who identified themselves as coming from a rural hometown, 59% coming from an urban community, and 10% coming from a large city. Table 3.1 displays the descriptive data for the sample.
Table 3.1.
Sample Description
Dimension – Characteristic – Item Scale
Frequenc
Background Setting Rural 38 31.4
Non-Rural 83 68.6
(continued)
30 Table 3.1 (continued)
Dimension – Characteristic – Item Scale Frequency Percentage
Prior Cultural Exposure - Immersion Experience - Cultural Courses to Date
Prior Cultural Exposure - Immersion Experience - Highest Language Ability
Prior Cultural Exposure - Immersion Experience - Cross Cultural Friendships
Prior Cultural Exposure - Immersion Experience - Foreign Restaurants per week
Prior Cultural Exposure - Immersion Experience - Cultural Events per month
31 Table 3.1 (continued)
Dimension – Characteristic – Item Scale Frequency Percentage
Prior Cultural Exposure -Immersion Experience - Time Lived Abroad
Prior Cultural Exposure - Narrative Experience - Foreign Authored Books per month
0 100 82.6
1 16 13.2
2 4 3.3
3 0 0.0
> 4 1 .8
Prior Cultural Exposure - Narrative Experience - Foreign Perspective Books per month
Prior Cultural Exposure - Language Study - High School Courses
Prior Cultural Exposure - Language Study - College Courses
32 Table 3.1 (continued)
Dimension – Characteristic – Item Scale Frequency Percentage
Prior Cultural Exposure - Language Study - # of Languages Studied
0 17 14.0
1 76 62.8
2 24 19.8
3 2 1.7
> 4 1 .8
Gender Male 28 23.1
Female 93 76.9
Intended Work Setting Rural 16 13.2
Non-Rural 105 86.8
Research Instrument
A 44-item instrument was designed based on the literature. The survey was delivered and the results recorded electronically via an online survey system. The questionnaire consists of four sections. Section 1 contains 24 items measuring intercultural sensitivity using a 5-point Likert scale. Section 1 covers five dimensions of ICS as drawn from work by Chen and Starosta (2000). The first dimension, “interaction engagement” has to do with the feeling of involvement during an intercultural exchange. The next dimension is respect for cultural differences which are concerned with how tolerant the participant is towards cultural differences and opinions during cross cultural interactions. The third dimension measures the respondent’s confidence levels during interactions. Interaction enjoyment, the fourth dimension, assesses the respondent’s reactions during interaction as being positive or negative. Finally interaction attentiveness measures how much the respondents try to continually understand and assess what is occurring during cross cultural interactions. Table 3.2 lists the five dimensions of ICS and their corresponding items as they appear in the instrument.
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1. I enjoy interacting with people from different cultures.
11. I tend to wait before forming an impression of culturally-distinct counterparts.
13. I am open-minded to people from different cultures.
21. I often give positive responses to my culturally different counterpart during our interaction.
22. I avoid those situations where I will have to deal with culturally-distinct persons.*
23. I often show my culturally-distinct counterpart my understanding through verbal or nonverbal cues.
24. I have a feeling of enjoyment towards differences between my culturally-distinct counterpart and me.
Respect for Cultural Differences
2. I think people from other cultures are narrow-minded.*
7. I don't like to be with people from different cultures.*
8. I respect the values of people from different cultures.
16. I respect the ways people from different cultures behave.
18. I would not accept the opinions of people from different cultures.*
20. I think my culture is better than other cultures.*
*Items reversed coded before summing values. (continued)
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3. I am pretty sure of myself in interacting with people from different cultures.
4. I find it very hard to talk in front of people from different cultures.*
5. I always know what to say when interacting with people from different cultures.
6. I can be as sociable as I want to be when interacting with people from different cultures.
10. I feel confident when interacting with people from different cultures.
Interaction Enjoyment
9. I get upset easily when interacting with people from different cultures.*
12. I often get discouraged when I am with people from different cultures.*
15. I often feel useless when interacting with people from different cultures.*
Interaction Attentiveness
14. I am very observant when interacting with people from different cultures.
17. I try to obtain as much information as I can when interacting with people from different cultures.
19. I am sensitive to my culturally-distinct counterpart's subtle meanings during our interaction.
*Items reversed coded before summing values.
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Section 2 of the instrument investigates a person’s prior exposure to cultural diversity.
Section is divided into three categories: Language study, immersion experience, and narrative experience. Firstly, Language study is assessed through the following items: “25. I took ____
foreign language courses during high school: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4, or more; 26. I took ____ foreign language courses during college: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4, or more; 27. I have studied ______ foreign languages: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4, or more; 28. I consider my highest foreign language ability level to be: Non-Existent, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Fluent.
Immersion experience is divided into three aspects: physical immersion, academic immersion, and extracurricular immersion. Item 29 for instance measures time spent abroad as one aspect of physical immersion: “I have lived abroad in a foreign culture for _________.
0/NA, Less than 3 months, 3-6 months, 6-12 months, Over 1 year.” Academic immersion is assessed by item 29: “Between High School and College I’ve taken ______
cultural classes such as courses titled: “Cultures of the World” or “Intro to World Culture”: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4 or more.” Extracurricular immersion is measured by looking at the respondent’s cross cultural relationships, time spent at foreign restaurants, and attendance at cultural events using the following items: “30. I have _____ friends that are foreign nationals: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4 or more; 31. I eat at restaurants offering foreign cuisine _________ times a week: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4 or more; 35. Every year I attend ________ cultural events such as food, music, art festivals representing a culture different from my own: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4 or more.”
The narrative experience category gauges a person’s experience with understanding a foreign culture with items using the following items: “32. I watch ________ foreign films (non-English speaking) every month: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4 or more; 33. I read ________ foreign authored books each month: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4 or more; 34. I read ________ stories set in foreign culture each month: 0/NA, 1, 2, 3, 4 or more.”
Section three records the values for the intended work setting, be it an urban or a rural setting for the respondents. Because this measure requires a categorical response there is only a
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single item used: “Within 5 years of completing my nursing education, I hope to work in community classified as:__________. 1. Rural 2. Urban/Suburban 3.Metropolitan/ Large City.”
The third section of the instrument also poses demographic questions to determine the dimensions of the expected predictor variables gender and background setting. One item asks respondents to mark their gender. Four items ask participants to specify whether they come from a rural community or an urban community. Age and highest level of education were also queried in this section to act as control variables for the expected demographic predictors. Age was added to control for the likelihood of older individuals already having prior cultural exposure.
Furthermore, by controlling for a participant’s highest degree of education the instrument will take into account the effects of possessing multiple academic degrees might have had on a person’s level of ICS, prior cultural exposure, as well as general knowledge on cross-cultural communication.
Categorical Determination and Selection
One of this study’s independent variables, Background Setting, used four items with response options for one of three categories: Rural, Urban, Metropolitan. Two of the items, 38 and 39, measured travel distance from the participant’s home and the closest neighbor and convenience store. These items were removed due to inconsistency amongst themselves and with the other items responses. The inconsistency may be attributed to the layout of some small rural communities which have tightly packed towns surrounded by swaths of farmland. The second two items, 37 and 40, measured the respondent’s background by asking them what kind of town they are from or high school they attended. Because there were three nominal answers for these items the means for each category were compared using one-way ANOVA to determine which background item is most acceptable for establishing a respondent’s category.
Back_Town_37 had a significance of .03 compared with item Back_School_40 with a significance of .075. This means that item Back_Town_37 best establishes a respondent’s background setting category because they are statistically different from one another. Table 3.3 shows the one-way ANOVA results for these items.
37 Table 3.3
ANOVA Results for Background Category Items
Item Item Description Sum of
Squares df Means
Square F Sig
37 Asks respondent to which category
their home town belongs. 2.407 2 1.203 3.604 .030
40 Asks respondent to which category
their high school belongs. 1.799 2 .899 2.652 .075 Furthermore item Back_School_40, referring to a respondent’s high school setting, was not reliable at establishing the participant’s category because some respondents might have moved to a different community category for their high school years thus distorting the accuracy of the measurement. For these reasons the item querying a respondent’s home town was used for establishing a respondent’s category. For the purposes of this research responses were recoded into a dummy variable with rural answers valued as 0 and urban and metropolitan, or non-rural, responses coded as 1.
Validity and Reliability
After the data was collected, the resulting values were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) PC Version 20 software package. The sections of the instrument measuring ICS and prior cultural exposure used scaled responses and thus could undergo factor analysis to determine dimension reduction and check for cross loaded items. This means that EFA was conducted three times in this study. In the first instance ICS and prior cultural exposure items were combined and underwent exploratory factor analysis together to test for items loading on both the dependent and independent variables. The second and third instances of EFA the ICS and prior exposure scales underwent independent EFA to check for factor loading and component placement for determining dimensions. Although this research does not use the ICS scale at the dimensional level, EFA was still conducted to compare the results against the author’s original testing of the scale.
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Several commonly accepted criteria for determining the factorability were employed and the EFA procedure for each instance is as follows. Firstly, items were correlated to broadly test for factorability. Then the items’ Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin and Bartlett’s test of sphericity were calculated. Finally the communalities for each item were checked to ensure shared common variance. Following this factorability check, principle components analysis (PCA) was conducted to identify and compute factor scores. Only factors resulting with eigenvalues of 1 or greater were retained for the final dimensional placement.
The first instance of EFA involving the combination of ICS and prior exposure resulted in at least a correlation value of .3 for all items with at least one other item. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was .888, above the recommended value of .6, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (X2(630) = 2874.19, p <.05). See Table 3.4 for the KMO and Bartlett’s test results.
Table 3.4
KMO and Bartlett's Test scores for Exploratory Factor Analysis Instances
EFA Instance KMO Measure of Sampling Adequacy
Bartlett's Test of Sphericity
Chi-Square df Sig
Combined .888 2874.19 630 .000
ICS .931 2119.89 276 .000
Prior Cultural
Exposure .766 419.51 66 .000
Seven factors were retained and the communalities between these items were all above .3 reaffirming that each item shared some common variance with other items. The first factor accounted for 38.8% of variance and the cumulative total of variance explained by all the factors was 68.5%. Table 3.5 shows the factor loading and communalities for this instance of EFA combining the ICS and prior cultural exposure scales.
39 Table 3.5.
Factor Loadings and Communalities Based on a Principle Components Analysis with Orthogonal Rotation for 36 Items from ICS and Prior Exposure Scales (N = 121)
Item Former Dimension Component Communality
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
CultDiff_8 Respect for Cultural Differences .805 .737
IntEnga_13 Interaction Engagement .782 .768
CultDiff_20 Respect for Cultural Differences .773 .709
IntEnjy_9 Interaction Enjoyment .741 .751
CultDiff_7 Respect for Cultural Differences .737 .776
CultDiff_2 Respect for Cultural Differences .725 .62
IntEnga_22 Interaction Engagement .706 .824
IntEnjy_12 Interaction Enjoyment .703 .855
CultDiff_16 Respect for Cultural Differences .688 .687
CultDiff_18 Respect for Cultural Differences .66 .623
IntEnga_24 Interaction Engagement .61 .714
IntEnga_1 Interaction Engagement .61 .735
IntEnjy_15 Interaction Enjoyment .469 .682
† Items loaded onto unexpected factors (continued)
40 Table 3.5 (continued)
Item Former Dimension Component Communality
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
IntConf_3 Interaction Confidence .785 .767
IntAttntv_17 Interaction Attentiveness .673 .73
IntAttntv_14 Interaction Attentiveness .67 .676
IntConf_10 Interaction Confidence .654 .666
IntEnga_21 Interaction Engagement .65 .633
IntConf_4 Interaction Confidence .635 .711
IntConf_6 Interaction Confidence .559 .656
IntEnga_23 Interaction Engagement .502 .603
Expo_Frnd_30 Exposure - Immersion Experience .431† .471
Expo_Book_33 Exposure - Narrative
Experience .808 .774
Expo_Film_32 Exposure - Narrative
Experience .786 .707
Expo_Story_34 Exposure - Narrative
Experience .773 .733
Expo_Abroad_36 Exposure - Immersion
Experience .707 .652
† Items loaded onto unexpected factors (continued)
41 Table 3.5 (continued)
Item Former Dimension Component Communality
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Expo_Book_33 Exposure - Narrative
Experience .808 .774
Expo_Event_35 Exposure - Immersion
Experience .574 .647
IntConf_5 Interaction Confidence .417† .546
Expo_Lang_HS_25 Exposure - Language Study .781 .668
Expo_Lang_Study_27 Exposure - Language Study .757 .713
Expo_Lang_Coll_26 Exposure - Language Study .487 .486
Expo_Clss_29 Exposure - Immersion
Experience .747 .6
Expo_Lang_Highest_28 Exposure - Language Study .604 .652
Expo_Food_31 Exposure - Immersion
Experience .489
.424
IntEnga_11 Interaction Engagement .664 .66
IntAttntv_19 Interaction Attentiveness .512 .476
† Items loaded onto unexpected factors
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As Table 3.5 shows, items measuring cultural exposure loaded on three dimensions which are in accordance with their design. Two items cross loaded between the two study variables. Item “Expo_frnd_30” which concerns the respondent’s number of culturally different friends loaded onto a different factor weakly at .431 with a few ICS items. This may be explained because the ICS items “Expo_frnd_30” loaded onto a factor representing interaction confidence, attentiveness, and engagement, however, the weak loading renders this point negligible. The second to load on a different factor was item “IntConf_5”which regards the respondent’s confidence during cultural interactions. This item loaded with the two cultural exposure items “Expo_Abroad_36” and “Expo_Event_35.” This may be similarly explained by the nature of these items. The cultural exposure items measure a respondent’s level of exposure to cultural events and living situations which logically have an effect on their confidence level in such situations. However because “IntConf_5” had a low loading score of .417 compared with the other items this cross loading incident is insignificant as well.
The second instance of EFA examined just the ICS scale items. All of the items within this section correlated at least .3 with one other item indicating acceptable factorability. In this instance of EFA the KMO measure was .931 and Bartlett’s test of spherictiy was significant (X2(276) = 2119.89, p <.05). (See Table 3.4) Furthermore only one item had a communality score less than .3 reinforcing the existence of shared common variance amongst the items. The commonalities for this instance are presented in Table 3.6.
The items representing the ICS dependent variable only loaded across three dimensions which falls short of the five expected dimensions presented in the literature. Although this study does not conduct research on the dimensional level for ICS this divergence from the literature should be noted. The items loaded in such a manner as to retain one of the former dimensions,
“Respect for cultural differences,” and to coalesce into two blended dimensions. For the purposes of this research the new dimensions have been renamed according to the overall nature of their items. The first new dimension is “interaction surety” which solely contains items
“Respect for cultural differences,” and to coalesce into two blended dimensions. For the purposes of this research the new dimensions have been renamed according to the overall nature of their items. The first new dimension is “interaction surety” which solely contains items