Public Values and Beliefs Toward Nursing as a Career

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare the perceptions of "ideal career" and "nursing as a career." The goal was to provide information for development of innovative recruitment strategies. The sample of 1,116 included college freshmen, students in grades 6 through 12, parents, school nurses, teachers, and counselors. Data were analyzed by t test and analysis of variance to determine differences in attitudes between "ideal career" and "nursing as a career." Similar perceptions for both were opportunities for employment, application of intellectual abilities, caring for people, and an opportunity for academic and scholastic achievement. An "ideal career" was seen as more financially rewarding, more respected, and more powerful than nursing, and as providing more opportunities for leadership, for making decisions, for obtaining and applying knowledge, and for working in a safe environment. Recommendations include strategies to improve recruitment and retention of nurses.

Development and psychometric testing of the perception of nursing profession instrument

“…Currently, to our knowledge, instruments to objectively measure nursing applicants' perceptions as part of student selection for nursing education do not exist. In the literature, there are some instruments that are used to describe the perceptions related to the nursing profession; however, they measure different concepts, such as nurses' self‐image (Porter & Porter, 1991), healthcare professionals' nursing image (Sand‐Jecklin & Schaffer, 2006), attitudes (May et al, 1991; Toth et al, 1998) or orientation (Vanhanen & Janhonen, 2000) to the nursing profession, and they are self‐evaluation instruments. Porter and Porter's (1991) Nursing Image Scale (NIS) measures nurses' perceptions of their profession.…”

“…Rubbi et al, 2017). The Indiana Instrument created by May et al (1991) measures attitudes towards the nursing profession. The instrument consists of two parallel instruments that measure nursing as a career and ideal career with 17 identical items using a 5‐point Likert scale.…”