6 Demographics Age Years of RN work experience Area and years of current practice Clinical practice Education Administration Research Table 2: Descriptive statistics of continuous demographic data. n 173 173 146 30 25 2 Mean 41.25 14.07 11.28 5.80 6.56 9.00 SD 9.10 9.57 8.29 5.37 5.18 1.41 Nursing Research and Practice Md 43.00 14.07 11.28 5.80 6.56 9.00 Range 22 to 55 0 to 34 0 to 34 1 to 27 1 to 20 8 to 10 (87.9%) of these RNs responded that they would recommend nursing as a career to others (Table 1). Hypotheses 1 and 2 were tested using independent t- tests to determine the diﬀerences in career satisfaction and in intent to stay in nursing between the two groups, those who participated in a mentoring relationship and those who did not. In addition, Levene’s analysis was computed to test the assumption of homogeneity of variance [31, 34, 35]. Hypothesis 3 was tested using Pearson’s correlation. For the total sample of 173 RNs, the overall mean for the MNCSS was 89.05 (SD = 14.33) with a range of 46 to 112 (Table 3). For hypothesis 1, there was no statistically signiﬁcant diﬀerence on the MNCSS between nurses who participated in a mentoring relationship (n = 136; M = 89.79; SD = 13.94) and nurses who did not participate in a mentoring relationship (n = 37; M = 86.35; SD = 15.56). The mean number of years for intent to stay (n = 167) was 18.51 years (SD = 8.38). For hypothesis 2, there was no statistically signiﬁcant diﬀerence in the number of years nurses intended to stay for those who did or did not participate in a mentoring relationship. Additional details of the statistics for career satisfaction and intent to stay are presented in Tables 4 and 5. For hypothesis 3, the corre- lation between career satisfaction and intent to stay in the profession was positive (r = .15) and statistically signiﬁcant (P < .03, 1-tailed), however it was a weak correlation. Additional statistical analyses were computed using a one-way ANOVA to compare types of mentoring (formal, informal, both, and none) on career satisfaction and intent to stay, and a one-way ANOVA compared the types of the roles in a mentoring relationship (mentor, prote´ge´, both, or none) on career satisfaction and intent to stay; however, there was no statistical signiﬁcance found in any of the additional analyses. 3.2. Discussion. The diﬀerences in RNs’ career satisfaction and intent to stay in the profession were not statistically signiﬁcant for those who participated or did not participate in a mentoring relationship, regardless of whether it was a formal or informal relationship or if they were a mentor or prote´ge´. Although 78.6% of the nurses surveyed indicated some type of participation in a mentoring relationship, the largest percentage of mentoring occurred informally. This suggests that nurses may create informal mentoring relation- ships whether or not there is an opportunity for a formal mentoring relationship. These ﬁndings are consistent with what has been reported for several decades in the mentoring literature in nursing, which points to the prevalence of men- toring relationships in nursing [8, 10, 12, 14–17, 23, 27, 28, 30, 36–40]. The nursing literature indicated that mentoring occurred in various settings in the profession, such as clinical practice, education, administration, and research, although there was little literature to support career satisfaction as an outcome of mentoring relationships. In this study, the phenomenon of mentoring was identiﬁed by the majority of the participants which may suggest that nurses place value in mentoring; therefore, researchers need to identify better measures of the outcomes of mentoring relationships. Overall, the RNs in the sample reported generally mod- erate to high career satisfaction, regardless of whether or not they participated in a mentoring relationship. Although participation in a mentoring relationship did not have a statistically signiﬁcant inﬂuence on career satisfaction, the majority of nurses surveyed participated in these relation- ships, which suggests that the value of mentoring may lie not in career satisfaction, but in other outcomes that were not measured in this study. Although, there was limited literature on intent to stay in the profession, Krozek [41] indicated that 35% to 60% of nurses nationwide were leaving nursing within the ﬁrst year of their career. Since the average age in the current study was 41.25 and this population intended to stay for almost another 20 years, it is likely that there are reasons other than mentoring that contributed to nurses staying in the profession longer, such as job security, the altruistic value of nursing, the caring nature of nursing, or the lack of other career options. Although participation in a mentoring relationship was not a signiﬁcant factor in intent to stay, with the current shortage of nursing and the aging of the nursing workforce, it is encouraging to see that RNs intended to stay for almost 20 more years. However, since this study did not capture the younger population of nurses as was hoped, it is possible that the results may have been diﬀerent if the participants were younger. The ﬁndings of this research did not support the research hypotheses 1 and 2. It is possible that nurses who were not satisﬁed with their career or did not participate in a mentoring relationship or planned to leave their career in nursing may have elected not to participate in the study. In addition, the mean age plus the overall high satisfaction scores of the sample may have inﬂuenced the overall results