Factors Influencing Nursing Career Choice and Stress Among Generation Z Nursing Students in New Brunswick: A Cross-Sectional Study

Student summary

Why This Research Matters

This Canadian study looked at why Generation Z nursing students choose nursing as a career, and how stressed they feel while training. Generation Z means students born after 1997 — the newest wave entering nursing programs. Researchers Yasin Yasin, Areej Al-Hamad, Kateryna Metersky, and Pamela Durepos published the work in the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, focusing on undergraduate nursing students in New Brunswick.

The study used a cross-sectional survey design, meaning it collected data from students at one point in time rather than tracking them over months or years. A total of 261 undergraduate nursing students completed the survey. To measure career motivation, the team used the Healthcare Career Choice Scale, a previously validated tool that captures different reasons people choose health careers, such as interest in patient contact, desire for social contribution, and views on job security. Stress was measured with a single-item stress question, a simple self-report rating rather than a lengthy questionnaire. The researchers then used descriptive statistics (to summarize patterns) and inferential statistics (to test whether differences between groups were likely due to more than chance) to explore the data.

The results showed that students were mainly drawn to nursing for intrinsic and social utility reasons. In plain language, that means they wanted to work directly with patients, grow professionally, and feel they were contributing something meaningful to society — rather than being driven mainly by pay, prestige, or family pressure. This lines up with a long tradition of research showing altruism and a desire to help others as central motivators for choosing nursing.

The study also found real differences in career-choice factors depending on students' backgrounds. Statistically significant differences showed up across gender, age, race/ethnicity, country or region of origin, and prior educational background. In other words, what draws a student to nursing is not one-size-fits-all — a mature student with a prior degree may weigh things differently than a younger student straight out of high school, and students from different cultural backgrounds may emphasize different values.

On stress, participants reported moderate to high levels overall — nursing school is demanding, and this study confirms students are feeling that pressure. Interestingly, though, this reported stress was not significantly linked to any of the sociodemographic variables studied. That means no particular group (by gender, age, ethnicity, origin, or education) reported meaningfully more or less stress than another. Stress appeared to be a shared experience across the whole sample, rather than concentrated in one subgroup.

What does this mean for nursing education? The authors conclude that altruistic, socially driven motivation is the dominant force pulling Generation Z students into nursing, and that nursing programs need to build supportive, inclusive, and wellness-focused environments to match. Because stress was high across the board rather than isolated to specific groups, the authors suggest that structural and psychosocial barriers — things like workload, clinical placement pressure, financial strain, or lack of mentorship — likely affect most students in some way, and addressing them broadly (not just for one demographic) could improve well-being, retention, and the long-term sustainability of the nursing workforce.

For nursing students reading this, the takeaway is validating: if you chose nursing because you wanted to help people and grow professionally, you are in good company, and the stress you may be feeling in your program is common rather than unusual. For future nurses and faculty, the study is a reminder that recruitment messaging emphasizing patient connection and social contribution likely resonates most with this generation, while retention and support strategies need to address stress as a universal challenge rather than a niche problem for particular student groups.

Faculty notes

Educational Relevance

This cross-sectional survey study (n = 261) examines two related but distinct constructs among Generation Z undergraduate nursing students in New Brunswick: the factors driving their choice of nursing as a career, and their self-reported stress levels, with attention to sociodemographic patterning in both. It contributes needed Canadian, provincial-level data to a literature that has largely relied on international or U.S. samples when discussing Generation Z's motivations for entering health professions.

Methodologically, the study pairs a validated instrument — the Healthcare Career Choice Scale — with a single-item global stress measure, then applies descriptive and inferential statistics to test associations between sociodemographic variables (gender, age, race/ethnicity, origin, prior educational background) and both career-choice factors and stress. This is a reasonably efficient design for a survey-based dissertation-style project: the validated scale lends measurement credibility to the career-choice findings, while the single-item stress measure trades psychometric depth for respondent burden reduction, a common and defensible tradeoff in busy nursing programs.

The headline finding — that intrinsic and social utility values (patient contact, professional growth, contributing to society) dominate as career motivators — replicates a well-established pattern in career-choice research across generations of nursing students, and extends it specifically to a Canadian Generation Z cohort. For curriculum planning and recruitment committees, this reinforces that messaging and mentorship built around meaningful patient relationships and social contribution is likely to resonate more than messaging built around salary or job security alone, though the study did not report the full magnitude or ranking of every subscale.

The sociodemographic differences in career-choice factors (across gender, age, ethnicity, origin, and educational background) are worth unpacking in seminar: they suggest that a single recruitment or orientation narrative may not serve an increasingly diverse nursing student body equally well, and that admissions and student-affairs teams should be cautious about assuming homogeneous motivation profiles.

The stress finding is the more provocative teaching point: moderate-to-high stress was common, but not significantly associated with any sociodemographic variable measured. Faculty should resist over-interpreting this as evidence that stress is evenly resolved or benign — a null association with the demographics tested does not rule out other unmeasured contributors (program year, clinical placement intensity, financial precarity, caregiving responsibilities) driving the variance instead. It does, however, support a universal-design approach to student wellness programming, rather than one narrowly targeted at a presumed high-risk demographic subgroup.

Key limitations for appraisal include the single-province sample; the cross-sectional design, which precludes causal or longitudinal claims about how motivation or stress evolves across a nursing program; and the use of a single-item stress measure, which sacrifices the nuance of validated multi-item stress or burnout instruments. Discussion should also address generalizability beyond New Brunswick, and the value of pairing this survey data with qualitative follow-up to explain why stress was demographically uniform. This study is well suited for seminar discussion on instrument selection tradeoffs, the recruitment-versus-retention distinction in nursing education research, and how equity-oriented curriculum design should respond to demographic differences in motivation without assuming demographic differences in distress.