Background: Nurses care for disabled people in society.
Objectives: The aim of this experimental study was to investigate the effect of disability empathy activities on strengthening the positive attitudes of nursing students towards disabled people.
Design: An experimental study. Pretest-Posttest control group arrangement was used.
Methods: This research has been conducted with 116 nursing students (53 experimental and 63 control). The data were collected with "Attitudes Towards Disabled Persons Scale" (ATDP).
Results: Before the experiment, there was no significant difference between ATDP scores of experimental and control groups (p > 0.05). After the experiment, second ATDP scores of experimental group (66.81 ± 14.27) were found to be significantly higher than the scores of control group (59.02 ± 11.71) (p = 0.002). After six months, third ATDP scores of experimental group (63.58 ± 13.46) were also found to be higher than the scores of control group (58.43 ± 11.03) (p = 0.025).
Conclusions: Empathy activities applied to understand disabled people affected the attitudes of student nurses towards disabled people positively.
Keywords: attitude strengthening; attitudes towards the disabled person; empathy activity; nursing student.