Associations between nurses’ caring behavior and moral sensitivity :Latent Profile Analysis

Background Caring behavior influence patients’ recovery and improving nursing quality.However,potential categories of caring behavior and the relationship between nurses’ caring behavior and moral sensitivity,remain unclear. Objective This study aimed to examine the current situation of nurses’ caring behavior,the correlation between nurses’ caring behavior and moral sensitivity,identify potential categories,and analyze the distribution characteristics of demographic variables in each subgroup. Methods The research was a descriptive, correlational study. Data were collected using Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire-Revised Version into Chinese,MSQR-CV(range: 9–54) and the Chinese version of Caring Behavior Inventory(CBI) (range: 24–144). A total of 387 nursing staff were seleted to be included in this research using a convenience sampling method.Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was conducted to explore nurses’ caring behavior with 3 dimensions of the Chinese version of Caring Behavior Inventory as explicit variables.The influencing factors of different potential profiles of nurses’ caring behavior were analyzed using logistic regression analysis.Differences between profiles were analysed by MANOVA and ANOVAs as a follow-up. Results The LPA results showed that the three-profile model was the most suitable and supported the existence of three distinct QOL profiles: high(27.39%), moderate (34.11%) and low(8.4%). The relative entropy value was high (0.975), results pointed to a good profile solution and the three profiles differed significantly from one another. Conclusions The overall nurses’ caring behavior was at a moderate to high level.The classification of nurses could be predicted by factors, such as educational level, participation in caring training,grading of nurses and age.Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between the dimension of moral power and responsibility in moral sensitivity and caring behavior in nurses.On the contrary,lower dimension of moral burden,which was the negative dimension of moral sensitivity tended to higher caring behavior in nurses.Nursing managers can formulate targeted interventions according to the influencing factors of potential profiles to improve nurses’ caring behavior.