In their article, Wu, Fox, Stokes, and Adam (2012) explore issues connected with the present-day nursing faculty and its professional work in terms of recruitment and retention of newly graduated students. According to their research hypothesis, the combination of two multilayer factors, the numerous roles that nurses perform and the low level of job satisfaction, leads to stress and the decision to quit and contributes to the shortage of specialists.
To study two dependent variables, job satisfaction, and workload, the authors introduce many independent variables: gender, race, formal education, graduation time, academic rank, tenure, enrollment in formal education programs, and others. Some of them are nominal (e.g., gender) while the majority are ordinal variables. In this study, nominal variables are simultaneously continuous, and ordinary variables are discrete.
In this research, a stepwise linear regression analysis was carried out (Wu et al., 2012). As the authors state, they administered independent t-tests to evaluate the differences in participants.
Based on the results of the statistical tests, the following conclusions are made by the researchers. Since newly graduated nurses have to face numerous challenges connected with the process of transitioning from the student environment to the professional RN activities, all participants were subject to stress, but the indexes differ depending on the students’ status: junior RNs and BSN graduates are more likely to suffer from stress (Wu et al., 2012). The analysis demonstrates that only one factor, equipment issues, is directly connected with the nurses’ plans to leave their job. The authors conclude with the statement that it is necessary to explore work-related stressors and implement peculiar strategies to help newly graduated specialists adapt to the working environment.
References
Wu, T. Y., Fox, D. P., Stokes, C., & Adam, C. (2012). Work-related stress and intention to quit in newly graduated nurses. Nurse Education Today, 32(6), 669-674.