Student nurses' conceptions of internationalization: a phenomenographic study.

A phenomenographic approach was used when analysing and interpreting interviews with 25 student nurses in order to describe their conceptions of internationalization. The results are presented in five categories and various subcategories, forming an outcome space. The categories describe forms of understanding, or ways of thinking about internationalization, which, in relation to internationalization as a whole, were either atomistic or holistic in character. The data revealed that nursing students shared some aspects of meaning when thinking of internationalization. These aspects seemed to be understood in a similar way by all students, whereas, when students thought about internationalization as a whole, they assigned it different meanings. In two of the categories aspects of meaning were fragmentarily related to each other, and represented only one perspective. These two categories are to be compared to the other three categories which were more complex and holistic in character, since they contained more than one perspective as well as more aspects of meaning, and related in several different ways. From a pedagogical point of view, the findings point to the importance of teachers trying, in an active way, to confront students with as many existing variations of conceptualized wholes related to internationalization as possible, by using forms of understanding originating from a holistic approach.