Abstract
ObjectiveNursing Professionalism was measured by Hall’s Professionalism Scale, consisting of 50 items. The scale was developed to measure the attitudes and ideologies held by professionals in various professional occupations by measuring five attitudinal constructs of professionalism, namely ‘sense of calling to the field’, ‘autonomy’, ‘using a professional organisation as a major referent’, ‘belief in self-regulation’, and ‘belief in public service’. This study focussed on determining the practically significant differences that exist between the means of the five constructs of Hall’s Professionalism Scale and certain demographic variables among nurses in South Africa. The 11-item demographic profile included the following variables: gender (1), age (2), age when becoming a professional nurse (3), undergraduate qualifications (4), marital status (5), number of children (6), employment sector (7), years’ of nursing experience (8), international experience (9), employment status (10) and satisfaction with nursing as a career (11).ResultsOnly (7/11) demographic profile variables had an association with one or more of the five Hall’s Professionalism Scale constructs The variables included the following items: age (2), age when becoming a professional nurse (3), number of children (6), years of nursing experience (8), international experience (9), employment status (10), and satisfaction with nursing as a career (11).
Highlights
Results(7/11) demographic profile variables had an association with one or more of the five Hall’s Professionalism Scale constructs The variables included the following items: age (2), age when becoming a professional nurse (3), number of children (6), years of nursing experience (8), international experience (9), employment status (10), and satisfaction with nursing as a career (11)
Nursing professionalism has a value-based foundation and is important to the success of healthcare services and standards and the delivery of quality patient care [1]
This study is part of a project with two objectives: (1) to determine the construct validity and internal consistency of Hall’s professionalism scale (HPS) tested on South African nurses [1]; (2) to determine the practically significant differences that exist between the means of the five constructs of HPS and certain demographic variables
Summary
The results were presented in three steps. Step 1, included the demographic profile and descriptive statistics of the HPS constructs; step 2, described the association of demographic variables with HPS constructs; and step 3, described the correlation between the HPS constructs. Item 8: years’ nursing experience Spearman’s rank order correlation indicated that the years of professional nursing experience was directly proportional to the ‘belief in self-regulation’ (r = -0.157*). Item 11: satisfaction with nursing as a career Nurses who were satisfied with a nursing career had a higher ‘sense of calling to the field’ (M = 2.44, SD = 0.66, Cohen’s d value 0.58; p > 0.05) and ‘belief in public service’ (M = 1.86, SD = 0.54) than those who were dissatisfied (M = 2.41, SD = 0.77), which was statistically significant (Cohen’s d value 0.72; p = 0.01). Cronbach’s alpha for cognitive tests is 0.70, but when dealing with cognitive constructs such as professionalism, values below 0.70 would be foreseeable, owing to the diversity of the constructs being measured [17]
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