"MAKING A DIFFERENCE": AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF WOMEN'S CAREER MOTIVATIONS, VALUES, AND WORK SATISFACTION IN NURSING. (VOLUMES I AND II).
Contributors: Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.)
Published: 1993
Number of pages: 1044
Subjects: Anthropology, Cultural.; Women's Studies.; Sociology, Industrial and Labor Relations.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: Nurses, who comprise the largest group of health care professionals in America, mainly determine the quality of health care. Nurses apply their holistic knowledge to help people manage the changes brought on by disease, educate them about preventitive health care, and improve the quality of health care in family, organizational, and community contexts. Many factors caused the severe nursing shortage which has persisted since 1986; in particular, the demand for nurses who can care for the large numbers of chronically ill and frail elderly people far exceeds the supply, and restructuring of the nation's health care system has made nursing jobs less attractive because nurses have less time to help patients recover.

This ethnography illuminates these issues through its in-depth, qualitative analysis of what nursing means to nurses, the values and expectations they bring to their work, and how their values became integral parts of their decisions to enter the nursing profession and remain in, quit, or reenter nursing jobs. The narratives presented here derive from open-ended interviews with fifty-three women of various ages, ethnic identities, educational backgrounds, and career histories in nursing. Narrative analysis interprets the themes patterning the women's accounts of their career decisions as aspects of their "career life stories", while analysis of their accounts into "lexical/semantic fields", or meaning relationships, renders explicit the connections between their values and career decisions.

Overall, the women considered the opportunity to "make a difference in people's lives", the challenges of being the "patient's advocate", financial stability, and flexibility of schedules and work settings to be nursing's most appealing assets. They stressed that hospitals need to implement a range of critical "retention tools", especially support for nurses' professional endeavors, recognition and compensation for their contributions, a "voice" in the determination of hospital policies, more flexible scheduling, and, most urgently, staffing that enables them to meet the needs of their patients. Women had quite nursing jobs and embarked on new careers affording them greater autonomy and better compensation, recognition, and working conditions apply their nursing backgrounds to their new fields, and their identities as nurses remain strong.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-01, Section: A, page: 0107.

Thesis (PH.D.)--NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, 1993.

School code: 0163.