Improving the nursing studentsʹʹ assertiveness skills by participating in recreational physical activities

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of recreational physical activities on nursing students’ assertiveness in Turkey. 63 university students volunteered to participated in the study and were ramdomly assigned to experimental (Mage=18,90±1,09) and control (Mage=18,76±1,03) groups. The experimental group participated in the recreational physical activities program which was conducted in two sessions each lasting one hour within a week. During this period, the control group did not participate in any regular recreational physical activity program. Rathus Assertiveness Scale which was developed by Rathus (1973) were administered to participants before and after 12-week period. As the result of the analysis, participants in the experimental group improved more assertiveness than those in the control group. The data was analyzed by SPSS 16.0 Package Program. Descriptive statistics, paired samples t test, analysis were used to analyze the data. Level of significance was determined to be 0.05. As a result, the recreational physical activities positively affected the assertiveness on nursing students.