The Relationship Between Nurses' Approaches to Ethical Issues and Their Attitudes Towards Principles of Ethics: A Descriptive, Correlational Research Design.

OBJECTIVE: Nurses are likely to encounter many ethical issues in their practice. Ethical principles provide an important framework for considering ethical issues in nursing practice. The study was designed to examine the relationship between nurses' approaches to ethical issues and their attitudes toward ethical principles. METHODS: This descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted with nurses at a university hospital between 1 October 2023, and 28 January 2024. A total of 220 nurses who met the study criteria participated in the study. Data were collected using a Descriptive Characteristics Form, the Ethical Issues Approach Scale, and the Ethical Principles Attitude Scale. RESULTS: The nurses' median scores on the Ethical Principles Attitude Scale and the Ethical Issues Approach Scale were 61.00 (53.00-67.00) and 23.00 (19.00-29.00), respectively. The findings revealed a statistically significant, low positive correlation between nurses' attitudes toward ethical principles and their approaches to ethical issues (r = 0.273, p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: This study found a weak but statistically significant positive correlation between nurses' attitudes toward ethical principles and their approaches to ethical issues. Because lower scores on the Ethical Principles Attitude Scale indicate more favourable attitudes, the finding suggests that stronger approaches to ethical issues were associated with less favourable attitudes toward ethical principles. This inverse association should be interpreted cautiously because the correlation was weak and the cross-sectional design does not allow causal inference.