The vocation to service as an attitude of life of the nursing student

Abstract

This qualitative research aims to understand the nursing student's vocation for service as an attitude of life based on the senses and meanings given by nursing students from UCLA and UNEFA who perform clinical internships. Epistemologically, the study is based on the Social Constructionism paradigm, in light of the interpretivist perspective and hermeneutics. Ontologically, it focuses on social phenomenology and methodologically it was supported by ethnography, with an emerging design. The research techniques were: social interaction, participant observation and discussion group. The social setting for the construction of the epistemic reality was the hospital context. For the hermeneutical interpretation of the information, I resorted to the processes of categorization and triangulation. Finally, the nursing student's vocation for service has two edges, from one perspective: it is a quality that arises from the experience that interns live in hospitalization wards; from another point of view: it is an innate quality that some people have, that is, it is part of their personality; which arises or lives in them as the personal need that drives them to help others.