Reducing Cultural Barriers: A Grounded Theory Approach to Nursing Student Attitudes After Multicultural Education

Myeongjeong Chae,1 Boyoung Kim2 1Department of Nursing, Gwangju Women’s University, Gwangju, South Korea; 2College of Nursing, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, 61469, South KoreaCorrespondence: Boyoung Kim, College of Nursing, Chonnam National University, 160 Baekseo-ro, Dong-gu, Gwangju, 61469, South Korea, Tel +82-62-530-4936, Fax +82-62-220-4544, Email [email protected]: This study uses grounded theory to explore the process and conceptual framework of how nursing students’ attitudes toward others and different cultures change after receiving education on multicultural understanding.Methods: This study used the Corbin and Strauss grounded theory throughout data collection and analysis. We used purposive sampling to select participants and then gathered data through in-depth interviews with 18 students who completed a multicultural understanding education course.Results: Two researchers conducted a comparative semantic analysis of the transcribed data, applying open, axial, and selective coding techniques. With the collected data, the two researchers exchanged opinions to categorize and structure the data according to the research questions. Through the analysis, open coding yielded 11 categories and 26 subcategories from 135 concepts. In a model that recombined nine categories through axial coding, the central phenomenon was “distance”, while the core category was “perceive people from different cultures as others/accept with reduced distance”.Conclusion: Since nursing students are more likely to care for patients from diverse cultural backgrounds in their future clinical practice, they must have specialized cultural knowledge.Keywords: multicultural, education, cultural barrier, distance, nursing student