A JOB-SATISFACTION SCALE FOR NURSES

A multi-faceted nursing job satisfaction scale was constructed by firs t interviewing nurses to identify salient domains of their work experi ence. An initial pool of 33 items, constructed to represent the work d omains, was administered to a national sample of staff nurses in publi c hospitals (n = 1249) and then again after five months. Twenty-four i tems were selected and the resulting scale was found to have acceptabl e internal and temporal reliabilities, an interpretable factorial stru cture that was replicable in the second survey, as well as cross valid ity when correlated with organisational commitment. Information on emp loyee turnover over a 15-month period was collected for testing the pr edictive validity of the scale by means of proportional hazards regres sion, which is a relatively new and more powerful modeling technique t han multiple regression. The results showed that turnover was signific antly related to overall job satisfaction, particularly to career pros pects and relationships with supervisors.