The Use of an Autobiographical Letter in the Nursing Admissions Process: Initial Reliability and Validity

Abstract

Nursing education has a two-fold accountability. First it must provide nursing students with a quality education and second it must provide society with professional nurses capable of providing quality health care (Rothman & Rothman, 1977). To ensure this accountability, nursing programmes use a variety of admissions criteria and processes to identify students who will perform well academically and professionally. Yet the reliability and validity of admission criteria and the selection processes continues to be a recurrent and unresolved issue. The admission process is an extremely complex issue, affected by a number of interacting factors (RNAO, 1981). Student-related factors include limited enrolments that necessitate the identification of the most suitable candidates, unidentified factors that motivate applicants to seek nursing education, recruitment activities of the nursing programmes, characteristics of success both in the nursing programme and in nursing practice, and reasons behind the attrition rates. Other factors include varying philosophies of education; curriculum models and teaching methods that may require particular unique student and faculty qualities and abilities; availability of resources in both the educational and clinical facilities; and, the changing expectations and demands with respect to the competence of nurses and to employment opportunities. Finally, there is a dearth of research activities that would result in increased reliability and validity of the admission criteria and processes.