Table 1: Continued. Frequencya 152 20 Percent 87.90 11.60 5 Nursing Research and Practice Demographics Recommend nursing (n = 172) Yes No a Totals do not include missing data. b Two of the subjects did not indicate an area of current practice. responses for the group who did not participate in a men- toring relationship, this additional sample only yielded more subjects who had participated in a mentoring relationship. The required sample size of 102 subjects was determined based on a power analysis for both the t-test and the Pearson Correlation, using a power of .80 and a moderate eﬀect size for use of t-tests and Pearson’s correlation. For this study, the total sample was 173, but the group size for those RNs who did not participate in a mentoring relationship was only 37; therefore, the actual power in this study was .70 [32]. 2.6. Instrumentation. A demographic questionnaire and a newly developed, pilot-tested research instrument, the Mariani Nursing Career Satisfaction Scale (MNCSS), was used for data collection. The MNCSS developed by this re- searcher measured career satisfaction. The entire survey took approximately 20 minutes for the subjects to complete. The demographic questionnaire addressed the nurse’s age, gen- der, highest educational level, current employment status, years in practice, education, administration, or research, participation in a mentoring relationship, intent to stay in nursing (in years), whether the participant would choose nursing again and would recommend nursing as a career. Although, there were several valid and reliable instru- ments, such as the Stamps and Piedmonte Index of Work Satisfaction [33], to measure job satisfaction, a review of the literature revealed no valid and reliable instrument to speciﬁcally measure nurses’ career satisfaction. Therefore, a new instrument that more accurately represented the intent of this study, career satisfaction in the nursing profession, was developed. The MNCSS is a semantic diﬀerential scale with 16- bipolar adjective pairs on which the participants rated their feelings about their nursing career that best repre- sented their attitude toward the adjective. For the MNCSS, each adjective pair was scored on a seven-point scale using the lower number for the less positively worded adjective and the higher number for the most posi- tively worded adjective. An example of some of the 16 adjective pairs is satisﬁed-dissatisﬁed, fulﬁlled-discouraged, stimulated-bored, content-discontent, rewarded-frustrated, meaningful-not meaningful, and successful-unsuccessful. The sum of the point values of responses to all 16 items yielded a total MNCSS score. The total scores could range from 16 to 112 with a midpoint of 64. The overall content validity index (CVI) of the MNCSS was .84 for the 16- bipolar adjectives that were included as part of the instru- ment. Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency reliability of the instrument was .82 for the pilot study, and .94 for the full study. Prior to data collection, IRB approval was obtained. The participants received the demographic questionnaire and the MNCSS with a letter of explanation including the intent of the study and the deﬁnitions of key terms. Consent was implied by the participant’s return of the completed questionnaires. A stamped, return envelope was included to mail the questionnaire back to the researcher. The partici- pants were given information as to how they could access results of the study, if desired. Of the total 722 surveys that were mailed and distributed, 196 surveys were returned, and 173 of the surveys were usable for the research study. Of the 23 surveys that were not used 6 were not included because the respondents exceeded the age of 55 years of age, 10 were not currently employed in practice, education, administration, or research, 6 were returned after the ﬁnal due date, and 1 did not complete the career satisfaction scale. 3. Results and Discussion 3.1. Results. The statistical analyses were determined by the research hypotheses. For the MNCSS, a subject with more than two missing data bits was removed from the total sample. For two subjects who were missing a response to one item on the MNCSS, the missing data were replaced with the group mean [34]. Frequency and percentage statistics were computed for the variables of gender, education level, and area of practice and are presented in Table 1. The descriptive statistics, including mean, median, standard deviation, and range, were computed for the variables of age, years of practice, and years in nursing and are presented in Table 2. The average age of participants was 41.25 years, the youngest subject was 22 years old and the oldest was 55 years old. The mean number of years of work experience was 14.07 years, with the mean numbers of years in the clinical setting of 11.28 years. Further details of these descriptive statistics are presented in Table 2. Of the total sample (N = 173), 78.6% reported participating in a mentoring relationship, 41% of these mentoring relationships were informal; 21.4% of the RNs had not participated in a mentoring relationship. From the total sample, 44.5% had been in the role of both mentor and prote´ge´ at some point in their career, not just a mentor or a prote´ge´. The majority of RNs (n = 145, 83.8%) responded that they would choose nursing as a career again, and 152