Development and validation of the Nursing Workplace Satisfaction Questionnaire (NWSQ)
Greg Fairbrother
Nurse Manager Research & Clinical Policy, Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, Australia
Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Nursing Midwifery and Health.
Aaron Jones
Nursing Executive Officer, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, Australia
Ketty Rivas
Quality Manager, Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, Australia
PP: 10 - 18
Abstract
A nursing job satisfaction questionnaire was designed by a project group of nurses seeking a suitable job satisfaction measure to track as an outcome in a large Sydney hospital-wide models of nursing care project. Existing tools were rejected by the group as overly lengthy, US-biased and over-using respondent assessment of the character of the work environment as a proxy for job satisfaction, or happiness at work. A one-page, 14-item tool was developed after instrument reviewing and facilitated groupwork. The tool reduces to three measurable domains: intrinsic, extrinsic and relational job satisfaction. Exploratory factor analysis (n=220 responses) confirmed the validity of this 'three-way' conceptualisation of nursing job satisfaction. Internal consistency analysis on a larger sample of responses (n=459) yielded high Cronbach's Alpha values for all three domains and for the total overall, suggesting a stable and reliable measure. The NWSQ is short, one page, sensibly worded for Australian conditions and yields scoring against three validated domains. It holds significant potential utility as a standard metric for prospective ward-based or institution-wide performance trending.
Keywords
Nursing, job satisfaction, questionnaires, models of care, reliability, validity.
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