Influence of self-concept in the lifestyles of nursing students in a private university in Eastern Lima

Abstract

The academic formation of health science professionals involves their harmonious andintegral development as human beings, considering,among other elements, self-conceptand lifestyles, in order to become a proactiveagent of change in the place where theywork. Generally, health science students at the university level in Peru start as adolescents andcontinue into their later teenage years, a timewhen self-concept and behavior are developingwith a relation between the two. Additionally,university students often do not eat a balanceddiet, sleep an adequate number of hours eachnight, or do enough exercise during the week.This problem is compounded when they havea heavy course load, as is often the case forstudents in the health sciences. With this inmind, the objective of this study was to identifythe influence of self-concept on lifestylesin students of a private university in easternLima. The study has a non-experimental designand it is a quantitative study with an explanatory-causal and cross-sectional approach. Thesampling method used was non-probabilistic,and 135 students participated in the study,meeting the inclusion and exclusion criteria.Their ages ranged from 16 to 24 years old (M= 20) and the majority of the participants werefemale (87 %). The study was approved by theEthics Committee of the university. Two previouslyvalidated instruments were chosen tomeasure the primary variables of the study. TheLifestyle Questionnaire (PEPS-I), consistingof 48 questions with answers on a Likert scale,consists of six factors and was chosen since ithas already been validated with adolescents inPeru. The AF-5 has 30 questions grouped intofive factors, and it was chosen for the self-conceptvariable since it has already been validatedin a sample of university students in Peru. Bothinstruments were administered with the supportof the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences ofthe university where the study was carried out.Teachers of different courses granted around 20minutes of their class time for the study teammembers to come in, present the study, ask forinformed consent, and then apply the instrumentswith those who were willing to participate.In the descriptive analysis, the average ofthe lifestyle profile corresponds to the self-realizationdimension (43.2), followed by thehealth responsibility dimension (26.1) and thelowest average belongs to the exercise dimension(12.4). In the analysis of the self-concept variable, the social self-concept obtainedthe highest average (43.2) and the physicalself-concept presented the lowest average(28.2). A model was developed to explore therelationships between the two variables andwithin the factors of each variable. This modelshows that self-concept significantly influencesthe lifestyle of these students (β =.80; p