A sample BSN nursing thesis walks a full study — from the problem in Chapter 1 to the recommendations in Chapter 5 — using one running example: a knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) study on evidence-based wound care protocols among staff nurses in a government hospital. This is a labelled, illustrative model, not a real thesis to copy; every section is annotated with what a Philippine nursing panel checks for, and the running example uses bracketed placeholder figures rather than invented statistics, because a fabricated number is worse than none.
Use this as a map of how the five chapters connect in a quantitative BSN study, then build your own chapters from your own population, your own adviser’s manual and your own school’s format rules. For the section-by-section mechanics of each chapter on its own, the existing guides on Chapter 1, Chapter 3, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 go deeper than this overview can.
What this model thesis is, and what it is not
The running example below — “Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Staff Nurses on Evidence-Based Wound Care Protocols in a Government Hospital” — is built to show how a BSN Chapter 1 to 5 fits together as one argument: a gap in Chapter 1 that a specific instrument in Chapter 3 measures, producing tables in Chapter 4 that Chapter 5 answers directly. It is not a real dataset, not a real hospital, and not a study you can submit. Every number inside it is a bracketed placeholder — [n], [weighted mean], [p-value] — that your own data collection fills in. Copying the placeholder structure is normal; copying invented figures into your own manuscript is not, and a panel that has seen the same round numbers in two different theses will ask where they came from.
Chapter 1 — Introduction: the shape a BSN Chapter 1 needs
Background of the study. The funnel runs global to local: cite the global burden of surgical-site and pressure-related wounds, narrow to the Philippine hospital setting and DOH infection-control guidance, then land on the specific gap — that staff nurses’ actual practice does not always match what they know, and that gap is rarely measured directly rather than assumed. Each national or global figure in this section needs a named source and a year; where you have not opened the source yourself, describe the gap qualitatively instead of attaching a number to it.
Statement of the problem. A general statement — “This study determined the knowledge, attitude and practice of staff nurses on evidence-based wound care protocols in [Hospital], [Year]” — followed by three to five specific questions: the demographic profile of respondents (age, years of service, ward assignment), their knowledge level, their attitude level, their practice level, and whether a significant relationship exists between knowledge and practice, and between attitude and practice. Every specific question here has to map to a questionnaire part in Chapter 3 and a statistical test in Chapter 4 — a worked bank of statements like this, across eight other courses, is in the Chapter 1 guide’s statement-of-the-problem section linked above.
Theoretical framework. Orem’s Self-Care Deficit Nursing Theory is the framework this KAP design actually needs, not because it is the most cited nursing theory in general, but because its central mechanism — nursing agency (the nurse’s developed capability to design and deliver care) and the deliberate action of “wholly compensatory,” “partly compensatory” or “supportive-educative” nursing systems — maps directly onto a study asking whether a nurse’s knowledge of a protocol converts into the deliberate action of applying it. The theory-to-variable paragraph should say exactly that mechanism, not just name the theorist and year.
Significance of the study. Named beneficiaries only: the hospital’s infection-control committee (can target retraining to the specific gap the data shows), staff nurses (see where their own knowledge-practice gap sits against the ward average), nursing students on affiliation (a documented baseline before their own rotation), and future researchers (a replicable instrument for other wards). No beneficiary list padded with generic entries like “the researcher” or “the country.”
Scope and delimitation. Bounded to staff nurses (not student nurses or nursing aides) in the medical-surgical and surgical wards (not ICU or pediatrics, where wound protocols differ materially) of one named government hospital, over one semester. State plainly what the study does not cover — private hospital nurses, community health workers, or wound outcomes themselves, which is a clinical-trial question this design cannot answer.
Chapter 2 — Review of Related Literature: what a wound-care KAP study actually cites
Three literature bands, each doing a different job: (1) studies establishing that a knowledge-practice gap in wound care exists in other hospital settings, giving your own study its rationale; (2) studies that used the same or a similar KAP instrument, so your Chapter 3 can justify adapting rather than building from zero; (3) DOH and hospital-level infection-control policy documents, which is where the “practice” side of your variables gets its correct standard to compare against. The synthesis paragraph at the end of Chapter 2 should say, in your own words, what is already known and exactly what your local setting has not yet answered — that sentence is what turns a literature list into a literature review.
Chapter 3 — Research Methodology: the instrument and the numbers a nursing panel checks first
Research design. Descriptive-correlational — descriptive for the knowledge, attitude and practice levels themselves, correlational for the relationship between them. Not experimental, because no intervention is being tested; that distinction is worth stating explicitly, because a panel member will ask.
Population and sample. All staff nurses of the named wards, sample size computed with Slovin’s formula at a stated margin of error against the actual roster count the hospital’s nursing office provides — never a borrowed number from another thesis. n = N / (1 + Ne²), with N = [roster count] and e = 0.05, gives n = [computed].
Research instrument. A three-part questionnaire: Part I demographic profile; Part II a knowledge test (multiple-choice or true/false items scored against the current DOH or hospital wound-care protocol, not the researcher’s own opinion of the correct answer); Part III attitude and practice items on a four-point Likert scale, with the verbal interpretation ranges computed from the scale’s own division — for a 4-point scale, range 3 ÷ 4 = 0.75, giving 1.00–1.75 “Never Practiced” through 3.26–4.00 “Always Practiced” — the same computed-not-copied method the site’s own Chapter 3 guide walks through for other scales.
Validity and reliability. Content validated by three expert validators — an infection-control nurse, a nurse educator and a ward head nurse — with a pilot test on nurses outside the final sample and a Cronbach’s alpha reported for the knowledge, attitude and practice sub-scales separately, since a single pooled alpha across three different constructs is a common and avoidable Chapter 3 fault.
Statistical treatment. Frequency and percentage for the demographic profile; weighted mean for knowledge, attitude and practice levels; Pearson’s r or Spearman’s rho (chosen after a normality test) for the knowledge-practice and attitude-practice relationships. The full decision logic behind which test fits which BSN design — paired, KAP, pre/post or ward-comparison — is worked through in the site’s own nursing statistical-treatment guide.
Chapter 4 — Results and Discussion: one table, one paragraph, one theory check
Chapter 4 is organized in the same order as the specific questions in Chapter 1 — demographic profile first, then knowledge, then attitude, then practice, then the correlation table last. A single illustrative row looks like this:
| Indicator | Weighted Mean [illustrative] | Verbal Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Overall knowledge level | [x.xx] | [interpretation from the computed range] |
| Overall attitude level | [x.xx] | [interpretation from the computed range] |
| Overall practice level | [x.xx] | [interpretation from the computed range] |
| Knowledge–practice correlation | r = [x.xx], p = [x.xx] | [significant / not significant at α = 0.05] |
The discussion paragraph that follows each table does three things: states what the number means in plain language, compares it against the related studies named in Chapter 2 by author and year, and — this is the step that most BSN Chapter 4 drafts skip — discusses the finding against Orem’s framework specifically: does the result show nursing agency converting into action, or a gap the “supportive-educative” nursing system named in the theory would predict? A discussion chapter that never returns to its own theoretical framework reads as two disconnected chapters wearing one cover page.
Chapter 5 — Summary, Conclusions and Recommendations
The summary restates the problem and the method in two or three sentences — no new information. Conclusions answer the specific questions from Chapter 1 one for one, in the same order, and only in the strength the data actually supports: “practice levels were found to be moderate” is defensible; “wound care in the hospital is inadequate” is a claim the descriptive-correlational design was never built to make. Recommendations name a specific group for each one — the infection-control committee gets a retraining recommendation tied to the exact protocol item respondents scored lowest on; future researchers get the specific gap this design could not close, such as whether documented practice matches observed practice, which would need an observational design this KAP survey does not include.
What makes a model like this pass a nursing panel
Five things, in the order a panel actually checks them: the instrument traces back to a named, current protocol rather than the researcher’s own judgment of correct practice; the theoretical framework is used in the discussion, not just quoted in Chapter 1; every statistic in Chapter 4 has the matching test named in Chapter 3, with no substitution mid-study; the ethics and consent protocol for staff-nurse respondents is on file before data collection, following the general instrument validation standard; and the limitations in Chapter 5 name what a KAP survey design cannot show, rather than overselling a correlational finding as a causal one. A thesis built this way survives the questions a panel actually asks at the defense, because every chapter already answers them before the panel does.
Build your own nursing thesis chapters, not a copy of this one
Tesify drafts each chapter from your own population, hospital setting and instrument choices — the demographic profile, the KAP or comparative design that fits your specific ward, the weighted-mean tables and the discussion paragraphs that return to your own theoretical framework. Over 9,000 students have used it to write more than 15,000 chapters, and every word is still written by you.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use this exact topic — wound care KAP among staff nurses — for my own thesis?
Only if you first check it against your own hospital and confirm no recent study there has already covered it; the topic itself is common enough in Philippine nursing programs that panels will expect you to name your specific hospital, ward and protocol version as the differentiator, not the general topic.
Do all BSN theses need a theoretical framework like Orem’s?
No single theory is mandatory. The framework should be chosen because its mechanism actually matches your variables — Orem’s fits a knowledge-to-action gap; a different design, such as a comparative study of two wards, might fit better under a different nursing theory or none at all if the design is purely descriptive.
What if my hospital will not release the roster count I need for Slovin’s formula?
Ask the nursing office or HR for a total headcount figure without individual names attached, which is usually releasable even where individual staff records are not; if the hospital genuinely will not release any count, document that constraint in Chapter 3 and use a conservative, clearly justified estimate instead of inventing a precise number.
How long should a five-chapter BSN thesis be in total?
Length varies by school, but most Philippine BSN five-chapter manuscripts run in the range your own research manual specifies for the format check — the model above is a structural map, not a page-count target, and a shorter, tighter Chapter 4 with genuinely interpreted tables outperforms a padded one at defense.
Does a KAP design need ethics committee approval?
Yes. Staff nurses are still human respondents, and a hospital setting typically adds its own institutional clearance on top of the school’s ethics review before any questionnaire is distributed on hospital premises.