DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2018.v06i05.056

Pages: 2166-2172

Emotional intelligence can help us to assess information about emotions in everyday life as well as to reflect the energy created by them to our work and school life. Healthcare professionals with good emotional intelligence can also establish good relations with patients from various ethnic backgrounds. In parallel with the worldwide growing use of social media its use by healthcare professionals to reach knowledge, to maintain personal development, to improve health and to share experience about risks is also increasing. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the level of emotional intelligence and social media use in practicing nurses and nursing students in order to examine whether they contribute to personal and professional development of nurses. The universe of this study included nurses and nursing students in. Trakya University Nursing School and nurses who were working in Trakya University Health Center for Medical Research and Practice. Our study included 133 volunteers and conducted between February and October 2017. Seventy-eight of them was nursing students and 55 were nurses. Social Media Attitude Scale (SMAS) was used to evaluate social media use. To evaluate emotional intelligence Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) was used. Evaluation of the two groups (students and nurses) showed statistically significant differences in both SMAS and Bar-On scales. The mean SMAS score was 62.7 in nursing students and 53.9 in nurses. EQ-i score in nursing students was 291.9 and in nurses was 274.3. The mean scores of the nursing students who were continuing their education in the university were higher than practicing nurses. The nursing students used social media significantly more frequently than the nurses. Social media use more than once a day was more common in the students than the nurses. Duration of time spent in each entry to social media was more in the nursing students than the nurses. The nurses spent more time for social media at home