Investigating the Role of Nurse Educators in Shaping Professional Identity Among Nursing Students

Posted: Mar 18, 2020

• Ariana Chandler
• Caleb Torres
• Maya Preston

Abstract

This research presents a novel computational framework for analyzing the complex dynamics of professional identity formation among nursing students, with particular emphasis on the influential role of nurse educators. Traditional approaches to studying professional identity in nursing have relied predominantly on qualitative methods and self-report measures, which often fail to capture the nuanced, multi-dimensional nature of identity development over time. Our study introduces an innovative methodology that combines natural language processing, social network analysis, and longitudinal modeling to quantitatively assess how nurse educators shape professional identity through various pedagogical interactions, mentorship relationships, and clinical supervision. We developed a specialized corpus of nursing education interactions collected over a 24-month period across three academic institutions, comprising classroom dialogues, clinical debriefing sessions, and reflective journal entries. Using transformer-based language models fine-tuned on nursing professional discourse, we extracted latent patterns of identity-related language, values alignment, and professional role internalization. Our social network analysis revealed previously undocumented patterns of influence diffusion within nursing education environments, demonstrating how specific educator behaviors create cascading effects on student professional identity formation. The results indicate that nurse educators who employ deliberate identity-focused pedagogical strategies produce significantly stronger professional identity integration among students, with effect sizes ranging from 0.45 to 0.78 across different identity dimensions. Furthermore, our temporal analysis identified critical intervention points during the nursing education trajectory where educator influence is most potent. This research contributes both methodological innovations for studying professional development and practical insights for optimizing nursing education practices to enhance professional identity formation.