Level of autonomy of Turkish students in the final year of university baccalaureate degree in health related fields

This descriptive type study was conducted for the purpose of determining the level of autonomy of final-year students at Cumhuriyet University Nursing School, School for Health Sciences Midwifery School, Medical Faculty and Doctor of Dentistry Faculty. The research was conducted with a total of 221 students. Two forms were used for data collection in the research. The first was a 25-question personal information form including factors that affect autonomy in university students, which was prepared based on information in the literature. The second was the 30-item autonomy subscale from the Sociotropy/Autonomy Scale (SAS), which was developed by Beck et al (1983). It has been adapted for Turkish and has been tested for validity and reliability by Şahin et al (1993). The research data were loaded on the SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 11.0 program, and then frequency distribution, arithmetic mean, variance analysis (One-Way ANOVA) and Independent-Samples t Test were used in the evaluation of the data.

According to the General Autonomy score mean from the SAS used in this study, the students’ General Autonomy score mean was 80.94 ± 15.40, the final year midwifery students had the highest level of autonomy (X = 83.48 ± 11.98), followed by medical students (X = 81.23 ± 15.36), nursing students (X = 77.33 ± 15.19) and dental students (X = 72.90 ± 14.41). According to the results obtained, the nursing students’ level of autonomy was lower than the students’ levels of autonomy in the other health-related branches except for dental students.