PUERTO RICO NURSING PROFESSIONALS' LOCUS-OF-CONTROL, PERCEPTIONS REGARDING JOB SATISFACTION FACTORS, AND LEVEL OF EXPERIENCE.
Contributors: Fordham University.
Published: 1989
Number of pages: 158
Subjects: Education, Curriculum and Instruction.; Health Sciences, Nursing.; Psychology, Industrial.
Description: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between differences in the psychological attributes of locus of control and perceived job satisfaction exhibited by nurses at different levels of experience in their nursing career.

The Biosocial Data Form was used as a researcher-made questionnaire to collect data in order to categorize the 150 subjects into three levels of practice--preservice, beginning, and experienced. The Internal-External Scale (Rotter, 1966) was administered to classify nurses' locus of control either internal or external. The Index of Work Satisfaction (Slavitt et al., 1978) was used to assess nurses' perceptions in regard to seven job related factors: (a) Autonomy, (b) Doctor-Nurse Relationship, (c) Interaction, (d) Organizational Requirements, (e) Pay, (f) Professional Status, and (g) Task Requirements.

The data were statistically analyzed using the computer sub-program of SPSSX (Nie et al., 1975). Analyses of variance were done and a rank-order was established for the degree of importance given to the seven related job factors.

The results showed that: (a) the job factor that ranked highest in importance for the preservice and experienced nurses was Professional Status; for beginning nurses, Autonomy was ranked first; (b) no significant differences were found between mean scores on measures of job satisfaction and locus of control in the group of nurses; (c) no significant interaction was found between locus of control and level of experience on measure of job satisfaction.

The major conclusions drawn are the following: (a) Nurses, regardless of their locus of control, ranked the intrinsic job related-factors higher than the extrinsic factors; (b) locus of control accounted for no statistical significant variance on job satisfaction in the different groups of nurses; and (c) the main effect that contributed to variance was the length of time in the profession.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-01, Section: A, page: 0070.

Thesis (PH.D.)--FORDHAM UNIVERSITY, 1989.

School code: 0072.