The relationship between critical thinking and emotional intelligence in nursing students: A longitudinal study.

BACKGROUND: Emotional Intelligence and critical thinking are regarded as important traits that nurses have which may influence the quality of their work including clinical decision-making and reasoning ability and adoption of evidence-based practice and practice-based knowledge.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study is to investigate nursing students' critical thinking dispositions and emotional intelligence as an essential skill, over the course of the undergraduate nursing program.

DESIGN: A longitudinal design.

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: The research study was conducted as a longitudinal design. The target group of this study consists of 182 students studying at the faculty of nursing. Asymmetrical cluster sampling method has been applied to select the sample group and all students in their first academic year were included in the study.

METHOD: Information Form, California Critical Thinking Disposition Scale and Emotional Intelligence Assessment Scale were used in order to collect data. The data was analyzed by using frequency, standard deviation, Kruskal Wallis and Bonferroni test.

RESULTS: There was no relationship between sub-dimensions of emotional intelligence respectively; awareness of emotions, empathy, social skills in the first academic year and critical thinking disposition and the end of academic year. A moderate correlation was found in the positive direction between the self-motivation at the beginning of the academic year and critical thinking disposition at the end of the final academic year.

CONCLUSION: It is recommended that the nursing scholarship investigates the current issues on the subjects of emotional intelligence and critical thinking in detail, discuss different aspects of the subjects and debate over the criticisms. Briefly, the discussion should go beyond the scope of nursing and include different aspects.