Survey Results of the New Health Care Worker Study: Implications ...

467. Nurse OutcomesNurse outcomes examined here are commitment and job satisfaction. One objective ofthis research was to study commitment and job satisfaction issues among nurses. As individualoutcomes, these are important factors in determining the “health” of the labour supply of nurses.In this section, we examine career commitment and commitment to the hospital. While nurses'commitment to the hospital is important especially to employing hospitals, to understandwhether there might be problems in the nursing labour market, it is career commitment whichindicates whether nurses will stay in their careers. Organizational commitment and careercommitment then, in turn, affect job satisfaction and ultimately affect the retention of nurses.7.1. Commitment to CareerCommitment to career was measured by using Blau's (1985) career commitment scale.The scale consists of 8 items, each measured on a 5-point scale with 1 = strongly disagree, to 5 =strongly agree. Items were summed to create a scale score. The scale scores range from 8 to 40with higher scores indicating higher commitment to career. In creating the scale, scoring wasreversed for some scale items (as shown below). The average for commitment to career scale is25.3 (std. dev. = 6.3), suggesting a low to moderate level of commitment to the nursingprofession among our respondents [See Table 27]. The scale range and response range are thesame for this construct. A Cronbach’s alpha of .87 indicated a good internal reliability of thecommitment to career scale.