composed of a White minority, with 41% of students
living in poverty, and 12% of students enrolled in
bilingual education.
This research is part of a larger descriptive study
that examined and compared the rates of students
visiting school nurses to those making visits to
providers working in school-based health centers
(SBHCs). Because the purpose of this study is to
determine the factors that may contribute to students
making visits to school nurses, a cross-sectional
designed was used. Secondary analyses were conducted
on data that were collected from two existing
databases. The first data set contained visit information
that school nurses input into the School Nurse
Entry Database (SNED), which provides visit details
of individual student encounters. The second data set
contained student demographic data. These data were
originally collected and stored by the city in which the
school district resides. Individual student identification
numbers were identically scrambled and applied
to both data sets in order to analyze data at the individual
level as well as to link student demographic
variables to student visit data.
The original sample included only those students
who made visits to school nurses and other schoolbased
health providers. Because SBHCs are located
exclusively in middle and high schools in the district
under study, the sample for this study was confined to
all middle and high school students who used school
nurse services. The total number of middle and high
school students who made visits to 22 school nurses
was 12,797, and the total number of visits made by
these students was 51,767. With a total enrollment of
24,239 middle and high school students in the 2005–
2006 school year, more than half of all enrolled
students visited the school nurse at least one time.
This study was approved by the human subjects division
of the university in the state in which the school
district resides. School district protocols for research
on human subjects were also approved and followed.
Measures
Nominal measures were used to categorize student
use of school nurse services according to race, ethnicity,
and poverty. Data on frequencies and types of
visits made to school nurses were descriptively
analyzed among and between these populations to
determine whether usage patterns existed according
to the categorical variables. The instrument used to
obtain types and quantities of visits to school nurses