Data Empowerment in Nursing Professional Values Education: A Precision Approach to Enhance Third-Year Students’ Adaptability

Aim/objective : To address the “one-size-fits-all” dilemma in nursing professional values education by operationalizing “data empowerment” . Background : Third-year nursing students face complex challenges like stress and career uncertainty as they enter clinical practice. Traditional professional values education struggles with three main issues: superficial integration of knowledge and values, a rigid teaching approach, and a disconnect between content and students’ psychological needs. “Data empowerment” offers a promising solution to these challenges in professional values education. Design :A cross-sectional descriptive study. Methods : 358 third-year nursing students (69M/289F) from a Southwest China medical university were recruited via convenience sampling. Data were collected using the China College Student Adjustment Scale (CCSAS; 7 subscales, 5-point Likert) and a Demographic Questionnaire. IBM SPSS 26.0 analyzed data via t-tests/Mann-Whitney U and multiple linear regression. Results : Third-year nursing students exhibited lower adaptability (200.0 ± 27.5) than the norm (216.7 ± 31.1), especially in emotional, satisfaction, and self-adaptation areas. Many had low-to-medium adaptability in satisfaction (52.2%), campus adaptation (42.7%), and academic adjustment (35.5%). Key adaptability predictors were proactive major selection, good family finances, student association membership, healthy parents, and being female. Females excelled in academic/career adjustment, proactive selectors in emotional/satisfaction, and club members in academic/career/interpersonal adaptation. This suggests focusing on emotional empowerment, value clarification, role model guidance, resilience cultivation, and professional identity development. Conclusions : Data empowerment can enable precision education, shifting from “one-size-fits-all” to targeted strategies based on CCSAS-identified deficits and modifiable factors. This enhances adaptability and professional identity, offering empirical support for student-centered values education reform.