Theme Two: Students who most frequently encounter realistic images of nursing in popular culture often demonstrate informed awareness about critical issues in the profession.

A number of students located critical issues in the nursing profession amidst images in popular culture. Interestingly, television is where the most obvious instances of this advanced awareness proved to exist, or at least students best articulated critical issues by explaining their representation in television programming. An insightful respondent, considering the series ER, wrote, "Nurses are almost always women. Men always get to be the doctors. That's not fair. Women can be whatever they want to be." While it is problematic that the student implies being a doctor is better than being a nurse, the connection to critical field issues is clear: gender equity is a prominent issue in nursing today. Another student thinks about the impact of negative portrayals of nursing and shows critical awareness by having doubts about the fairness of such images: "I have rarely seen a good news broadcast about nurses. They emphasize the bad things. Like nurses in nursing homes, about how they hurt the elderly." And a second respondent concurs: "I occasionally watch the news but I regularly watch Dateline NBC -- their stories like the one about hospitals hiring custodial staff and placing them in a nursing position make me very uncomfortable."