Concept Anaylsis: Self Efficacy

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Self-Efficacy: A Concept Analysis

Introduction
Over the last 50 years, healthcare has moved from a perception of the patient as a passive recipient of care to one where patients are active participants in their health management. No longer do patients blindly and faithfully follow the instructions of their esteemed medical professional. Providers now function to support and empower patients to take primary responsibility for their own health. There has also been a shift in emphasis from treatment of acute disease to prevention and management of chronic disease. This change is driven by the economy as well as vastly increased ease of access to information. Nursing as a profession has generally focused on the patient as a whole, rather than simply as a disease process to be treated, and so have looked into other sciences to explain or predict the phenomena of the human experience. Psychology is one such area. Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory is of particular value to nurses. Bandura began forming his theory in 1963, and in 1977 identified the importance of “self-belief” in determining how people interpret their surroundings, their situation, as well their own future behaviors. Bandura’s research went against common theories of that time that heavily emphasized the role of the environment in human behavior, negating the role that cognition plays in how people construct reality, self-regulate, interpret information, and perform behaviors. It is from this line of thinking that the concept of self-efficacy evolved. Bandura said “people’s level of motivation, affective states and actions are based more on what they believe than on what is objectively true” (Bandura, 1997, p. 2).
In general, self-efficacy has been found in research to be an excellent predictor of behavior. Nurses see this played out before us every day in our practice. Amazing things happen. One
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