Quality of life and predictive factors among nursing students in the northeast of Thailand: a muticenter study

Abstract

This analytical cross-sectional study aimed to explore quality of life (QOL) and predictive factors among nursing students in Northeastern Thailand. Thai nursing students were recruited 3.750 nursing students from 15 universities located in Northeastern Thailand using multi-stage simple random sampling. The data were collected using self-administered questionnaires including baseline characteristics, eating behavior, quality of sleep, exercise behavior, stress, and QOL. The content validity and reliability of the eating behavior questionnaire were 0.94 and 0.83, respectively. The prevalence of good QOL was estimated. Binary logistic regression was employed to identify factors predicting QOL, and the area under the ROC curve was used to assess model discrimination. A p-value of less than .05 was considered significant.

In total, 3,750 nursing students were enrolled in this study. Most of them, 72.7% (70.53-73.43) reported experiencing a moderate level of QOL, while 22.46% (21.17-23.88) reported a good QOL. Factors predicting good QOL were increased quality of sleep by 1 point (OR=1.18; 1.02-1.06), good eating behavior (OR=1.78; 1.46-2.18), mild to moderate stress level (OR=1.94; 1.63-2.30), and moderate to good exercise behavior (OR=2.50; 2.10-2.99), respectively. Likewise, the total model successfully predicted a good QOL 74.0% of the time (area under ROC curve=0.74; 0.73-0.76, p<.001), indicating that this model could differentiate between nursing students who reported a good QOL and those who did not. Our findings may contribute to the emergence of policies and interventions that focus on factors predicting a good QOL. As a result, nursing education administers should emphasize the necessity of promoting physical and mental health and quality of sleeping in these students to improve their QOLs.