Knowledge and attitude of nursing students regarding older adults' sexuality: A cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although older adults are sexual, sexuality is infrequently discussed with them by health care professionals. Nursing students, as future professionals, can make an important contribution by developing competences in discussing intimacy and sexuality with older adults to increase quality of life and to prevent sexual problems. In order to improve these competences, current levels of knowledge and attitude need to be explored. OBJECTIVES: To investigate i) knowledge and attitudes of nursing students regarding intimacy and sexuality of older adults, ii) the difference in knowledge and attitudes of nursing students in different years of study and iii) frequency of discussing intimacy and sexuality with older adults. DESIGN: Cross-sectional. SETTINGS: A University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. PARTICIPANTS: Nursing students, ≥16 years who were able to read and write in Dutch. METHODS: The Ageing Sexual Knowledge and Attitudes Scale was used among nursing students. Furthermore, demographic information and frequencies were collected. Data was analyzed using SPSS. RESULTS: In total, 732 students participated. The mean knowledge-score was 43.9 (SD = 8.9), the mean attitude-score 64.3 (SD = 16.0). Unlike attitude, the level of knowledge differed significantly per year of study: first year students had the lowest and third year students the highest knowledge. Most students stated they 'never' (54.1%) or 'once' (13.2%) discussed intimacy and sexuality with older adults. Reasons to avoid talking about intimacy and sexuality were feelings of 'not being the right person' (17.3%) and 'incompetence' (14.0%). CONCLUSIONS: Nursing students had moderate knowledge and positive attitudes toward older adults' intimacy and sexuality. The knowledge-level differed per year of study, the attitude level did not. Only a minority discussed intimacy and sexuality with older adults. Moderate knowledge and positive attitudes do not mean that intimacy and sexuality is discussed. To ensure students feel responsible and competent, interventions should focus on continuous knowledge dissemination, role clarification and role modelling.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".