Medine KOÇ, Aygül KISSAL, Rıza ÇITIL, Yalçın ÖNDER

Attitudes of nursing and medical school students towards ageism

The present study aimed to evaluate the attitudes of nursing and medical school students towards age discrimination and to determine the association between these attitudes and various variables. A total of 662 students, 328 from the Faculty of Nurse Education and 334 from the Faculty of Medicine, participated in the present descriptive and cross-sectional study.Data were collected using Data Form for socio-demographic characteristicsand Ageism Attitude Scale (AAS). Descriptive statistics, t-test, Mann-Whitney U test, Chi-square test, One-Way ANOVA, and Kruskal Wallis test were used to evaluate the data using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows (Version 20.0). Nursing school students had higher points in “restricting the life of elderly people”, “positive discrimination towards them” and Ageism Attitude Scale, but had lower points in “negative discrimination towards them” compared to medical school students. While the points of “positive discrimination towards elderly” and Ageism Attitude Scale of the students of two schools were not significantly different (p>0.05), points of “restricting the life of elderly people” and “negative discrimination towards elderly” varied significantly between the students of two schools (p

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