Introducing the NLN/Carnegie National Survey of Nurse Educators: compensation, workload, and teaching practice.

IN THE FALL OF 2006, DR. PATRICIA BENNER, principal investigator for the Carnegie Foundation Preparation for the Professions Program, approached the NLN research division and proposed a partnership. Investigators for the Carnegie program had just completed an in-depth comparative study that involved visits to nine schools of nursing and interviews with students, faculty, and administrators. Now Carnegie researchers were interested in evaluating to what extent their findings were representative of nursing education nationally as well as across a variety of program types, institution types, and regions. Carnegie goals correlated with goals of the NLN. We had been planning an ambitious study of our own, hoping to obtain the empirical data needed to examine key factors suspected of exacerbating the nurse faculty shortage. NLN members have reported that some of these factors involved compensation for faculty. Program administrators were competing with clinical settings for talent and finding it difficult, or even impossible, to meet the salary expectations of graduate-prepared nurses. Existing data sources indicated that nurse faculty salaries were lower on average than those of other faculty in non-nursing fields. Other factors of concern to the NLN involved that the extensive demands of clinical preparation within academic institutions that add to nurse educators' workloads. However, the extent of these factors, their prevalence across regions, program types, and employment settings, remained unknown. Based on our shared goals, the NLN-Carnegie research partnership was born. It has been extraordinarily fruitful. The resulting NLN-Carnegie dataset, containing over 400 variables, promises to illuminate a wide variety of topics crucial to nursing education well into the future. This article serves as an introduction to this rich resource, providing a brief overview of some of the key topics broached by this study. Methodology In order to avoid sampling bias, an attempt was made to contact and invite each of the estimated 32,000 faculty members affiliated with the nation's 1,446 schools of nursing offering prelicensure RN or graduate nursing programs. On October 17, 2006, invitations were sent by email to 17,016 faculty members or administrators - both NLN members and nonmembers - whose email addresses were present in the NLN's database. Undeliverable email addresses were investigated and replaced, and missing email addresses were added to the database, resulting in a total of 18,176 email invitations being sent by mid-November 2006. In addition, 10,407 faculty without available email addresses were sent a postcard containing an invitation and the survey URL. As an additional measure, the deans and directors of all schools with eligible faculty were contacted by email and asked to encourage their schools' faculty to participate. Finally, survey respondents were encouraged to forward their invitations to colleagues to produce a "snowball effect." Ultimately, 8,498 nurse faculty participated in the web-based survey, yielding an estimated response rate of just over 25 percent among the nation's approximately 32,000 nurse educators. Findings and Preliminary Analysis While many of us have preconceived notions of the demographic profile of the nursing profession, it is useful to examine the characteristics of the nurse faculty population empirically, and also in relation to two key reference points - US academics and the nursing workforce. Sources for information about these reference points are found in the Sidebar. DIVERSITY Comparisons with US academics and the nursing workforce are illuminating. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of RN faculty are female (96 percent), compared with US postsecondary faculty, three fifths of whom are male. The underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities among nurse educators may be attributed to discrimination or socioeconomic disparities that impinge disproportionately upon minority groups trying to enter a high-skill occupation. …