Abstract
The purpose of this experiment was to scale the social perception of nurses through the methods of magnitude estimation, category estimation and cross-modality matching (line lengths). The study participants were high school and undergraduate students, active and retired medicine, psychology, nursing and dentistry professionals. Results revealed that: (1) the characteristics neat, responsible, clean, careful and efficacious occupied the first positions in terms of nurses' social perceptions, while useless, shameful, dishonest, irresponsible and hateful occupied the last positions on all scales obtained by the different direct psychophysics methods; (2) the scale of nurses' social perception is valid, stable and consistent and (3) the rankings resulting from the three methods produce highly concordant positions of perception for the different adjectives.
Highlights
The magnitude estimation method has been successfully used to measure the severity of different diseases
When combining the magnitude estimates from both samples, we found that dandruff received the lowest estimate, abortion the median and leukemia the highest estimate(1)
The ratio scale of social perception about nurses, based on the judgments obtained for the four different samples, evidences that the social perception consists of a block of adjectives that constitute the nursing professional stereotype: neat, responsible, clean, careful and efficacious
Summary
The magnitude estimation method has been successfully used to measure the severity of different diseases. The participants’ task was to estimate the magnitude of the diseases’ severity, indicating a number proportional to 500, which was the score designated to peptic ulcer, to each disease. Some examples of the diseases are: intestinal constipation, headache, diarrhea, sinusitis, acne, astigmatism, menopause, menstruation, eczema, medication allergy, gonorrhea, coma, depression, epilepsy, cerebrovascular accident, heart attack, uremia, cancer and leukemia. We found high levels of agreement between both samples in terms of their magnitude estimates and respective orders. The results indicated that the age, gender and civil status variables exerted a stronger effect on the nonmedical than on the medical sample’s judgments. When combining the magnitude estimates from both samples, we found that dandruff received the lowest estimate, abortion the median and leukemia the highest estimate(1). The same result pattern was found in other studies(2-3)
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