Job preferences of students and new graduates in nursing

Abstract

This article investigates the preferences of student and newly graduated nurses for pecuniary and nonpecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. It is the first study applying methods based on discrete choice experiments to a developed country nursing workforce. It is also the first to focus on the transition through university training and into work. This is particularly important as junior nurses have the lowest retention levels in the profession. We sample 526 individuals from nursing programmes in two Australian universities. Flexible and newly developed models combining heteroscedasticity with unobserved heterogeneity in scale and preference weights are estimated. Overall, salary remains the most important feature in increasing the probability that a job will be selected. 'Supportive management/staff' and 'quality of care' follow as the most important attributes from a list of 11 nonpecuniary characteristics. However, the subset of new graduates rank 'supportive management/staff' above salary increases, emphasizing the importance of a supportive workplace in the transition from university to the workplace. We find substantial preference heterogeneity and some attributes, such as the opportunity for clinical rotations, are found to be attractive to some nurses while seen as negative by others. Nursing retention could be improved by designing different employment packages to appeal to these different tastes.

The use of alternative preference elicitation methods in complex discrete choice experiments

“…As discussed in Doiron et al (2011), these response rates are similar to comparable cohort studies. Also, based on available demographics, there are but small differences between our cohort and all enrolled students.…”

“…This presentation sequence raises a concern that the comparability of preferences elicited by the two BWS methods is affected by fatigue. An earlier analysis of the multi-profile case data (Doiron et al, 2011), however, finds that the utility coefficients do not vary significantly over the 8 scenarios. Moreover, our findings on the differences in the estimates between the single and multi-profile cases do not support the wide-spread application of heuristic decision rules in the multi-profile case tasks that one may expect in the presence of respondent fatigue.…”

“…Also, based on available demographics, there are but small differences between our cohort and all enrolled students. For more details on the sample, see Doiron et al (2011).…”

“…We analyse discrete choice experiments collected as part of an ongoing longitudinal study of nursing job choices described more fully in Doiron et al (2011) and Kenny et al (2012). The data come from an online survey completed between September 2009 and September 2010.…”

Temporal Stability of Stated Preferences: The Case of Junior Nursing Jobs

“…The Australian DCE study of Doiron et al. (), for example, is the first study from a developed country to provide evidence on trade‐offs across several nursing job attributes, which have not been previously analysed together because of data limitations. Other recent DCE studies include Kolstad () on Tanzanian clinical officers, Sivey et al.…”