The goal of this interventional study is to assess the effects of an intervention on stress-related and work-related outcomes among Chinese nursing interns. The main questions it aims to answer are:

• Does expressive writing reduce clinical practice stress and improve coping strategies in nursing interns?
• Does expressive writing increase work engagement and perceived professional benefit among nursing interns?

Participants in the intervention group and control group will perform expressive writing and neutral writing, respectively, based on different given instructions. In both groups, writing will last for 10-15 minutes each time, twice a week, for nine weeks.

Researchers will compare the outcomes of the two groups to see if there are differences between clinical practice stress, coping strategies, work engagement, and perceived professional benefit.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Undergraduate nursing interns with no prior clinical practice experience.
• Be willing to fill in questionnaires and write according to the assigned writing prompts.
• Have never participated in writing therapy or stress management intervention programs.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Refuse to participate.
• Have severe psychiatric conditions.
• Undergoing any form of psychotherapy.
• With a habit of keeping diaries.

Withdrawal criteria:

• Termination of internship for whatever reason.
• Do not submit writing materials twice.

Individual deidentified participant data underlying the results reported in this article, including demographic information and outcome measures, will be shared.

The data will be available beginning one month after manuscript acceptance and will remain accessible for three years thereafter.

The data will be shared with researchers who submit a methodologically sound research proposal for non-commercial academic purposes. Requests should be submitted to the corresponding author, and approved requestors will be required to sign a data use agreement prior to data access.

This study is single-blinded. The intervention trainer will not be blinded because a single researcher conducts the study. In order to minimize experimenter bias, outcome assessments will be conducted through an online questionnaire survey platform (Wenjuanxing), with the trainer distributing the same link to all participants. During data collection, only acronyms of the questionnaires will be used to avoid self-fulfilling expectations.

Participants will be informed during the recruitment phase that the study aims to explore the effect of writing on the internship experience and feelings only. Assignment to the intervention or control group will remain undisclosed to participants until the end of the 4-week follow-up. Participants could unblind themselves by exiting the study and requesting debrief information.