Thesis

Foxall, Zimmerman, Standley & Beneet, 1990; Hatcher & Laschinger, 1996; Healy &
McKay, 1999; Lally & Pearce,1996; Lee & Henderson, 1996; Magennis, Slevin &
Cunningham, 1999; McGibbon, 1997; Melchior, Bours, Schmitz & Wittrichet, 1997; Murray,
1998; Ryan & Quayle, 1999; Snape & Cavanagh, 1993; Snelgrove, 1998; Tsai, 1993; van
Wijik, 1997; Watson & Feld, 1996; Webster & Hackett, 1999).
Kalichman, Gueritault-Chalvin & Demi (2000) looked at which different sources of stress can
be detected for nurses and how they are coping with these stress factors. For the researchers to
be able to identify a wide variety of situations in the nurse’s work situations which are causing
stress for them, the nurses were asked to name a situation which has been the most stressful
situation for them in their work place. A majority of the nurses (64%) stated that patient care
is the situation causing most of the stress for them in their job. When the researchers looked at
subgroups of stress it was shown that 20% of the nurses stated that personnel factors were
causing most of the stress in their job and 20% of the nurses stated that challenging patients
were causing most of the stress in their job. Looking at the most commonly recognized
specific source of stress for the nurses within the subcategories, staff conflicts were mentioned
with 11 % and next it was to deal with resistant patients with 7%. As a summary the
researchers stated that they found 32 categories of nurses experiencing work-related stress.
Situational reasons for stress and the personnel characteristics of the working environment
were mentioned by more than one third of all the nurses.
Lambert, Lambert, Itano, Inouye, Kim, et al. (2004) conducted a research with 1554 nurses in
four different countries: USA, Thailand, South Korea, and Japan. The results accounted for by
the researchers were cross cultural comparisons between the five different countries. The
highest levels of stress caused by all the workplace stressors were workload and dealing with
death/dying. This result could be found in all the countries. When it comes to mental and
physical health, all the nurses had approximately same scores for theses two variables except
for nurses working in Thailand. For the nurses in Thailand, their scores for mental health were
much lower than for the nurses working in South Korea, Japan, and USA. The researchers
conducted a multiple regression analysis for all the four countries to see how all the
independent variables could predict physical health, the independent variables being
workplace stressors, coping and demographic variables. It was interesting to see that the
nurses in all the four different countries stated that workplace stressors had the highest affect
on physical health, and more specifically that workload and death/dying were these workplace