Emotional intelligence among nursing students in Nepal

Introduction: Emotional Intelligence includes a set of skills and qualities that allow individuals to pilot social situations, form healthy relations, and make sound decisions based on emotional awareness. For providing compassionate care, nurses must be able to identify, use, manage and understand emotions not only in themselves but also in others. Objective: To assess the level of emotional intelligence among nursing students and to measure the association of emotional intelligence with selected demographic variables. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional, questionnaire-based survey was carried out among 240 nursing students enrolled in final year at private nursing campuses of province 2 in Nepal. The data was collected using Schutte Self Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT). Both descriptive (frequency, percentage) and inferential statistics (Chi-square test) were used to analyze data in SPSS vs20. Results: The findings of the study revealed, the age of participants ranged from 18 years to 31 years with mean age±SD being 20.47±2.043. Most of the participants, 88.3% were single, 52.2% resided in college hostel, 38.3% respondents’ father educational status were higher secondary and above, 35.4% and 72.9% of participants’ mother were illiterate and home maker respectively. Similarly, majority of the Participants 62.1% had low level of Emotional intelligence, 32.9% had average level of emotional intelligence and only few 5.0% of participants were having high level of emotional intelligence. Likewise, the findings also showed that there was significant association between level of emotional intelligence and age (p=0.012, p<0.05) of the participants. Similarly, there was no significant association of level of emotional intelligence with other demographic characteristics. Conclusion: The study findings reveal a significant proportion of participating nursing students had low levels of Emotional Intelligence from Nepal which indicates that students need to develop their emotional intelligence. Furthermore, the findings suggest that there was significant association between nursing students’ Emotional intelligence level and age. So, to increase the level of emotional intelligence educational workshops, education program and seminar need to be conducted regularly for the nursing students focusing on how to develop and improve emotional intelligence skills to work with patients in different clinical settings thereby enhancing their quality of life.