Comment

Professor Edens and class,

        The study was conducted upon the nursing workforce population in the United States and how it has changed in the last decade. The study was compared to the 2008 National Sample Study of Registered Nurses.  Some of the sampling data shown of the person on interests are the gender, age, level of education to include licensure type and certifications, and ethnicity or diversity.   As Houser (2021) mentioned "The first step of a sampling strategy is to clearly define the population of interest" (p156).  For this study, the POI (person of interest) are the Registered Nurses and Nurse Practitioners.  For this sample, survey was made in a 24-week period. A random sample of 102,690 nurses from the 4.6 million license records given by the National Council of the State Boards of Nursing and all individual state nursing boards (U. S. Department of Health and Human Services,2019).The sample results were sorted by state, age, gender, type of licensure and level of education, workplace locations, salary and employment status.

         Some of the data I find interesting is that there are 4.6 million license nurses recorded in the National Council of the State Boards of Nursing but at the end of 2017, there were only 3.9 million actively licensed nurses living in the United States (U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2019). This shows that there was at least 700,000 nurses who either had retired and or left the profession and didn't renew their licenses.  The survey also showed that the average age of current nurses when the study was conducted was 50 years old.  I also find it interesting that at age 50, there's a beginning shift of nurses working full time and transitioning themselves to part time status. Figure 8 table shows a decrease of 21.3% from 50-55 years old full time (FT) nurses to the ages 65-69 with an additional 33.5% drop at the ages of 70-74 years old (U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2019). In correlation to the FT nurses, there's a mirror effect in the number of part time (PT) nurses. It seemed that they are transitioning to this status in preparation for retirement or may have other factors relating to the changes in employment status change such as medical or leaving the workforce for other types of jobs.  Men in nursing has slowly increased according to the study.  I remember when I started Nursing school in the 1990's, there were only 2-3 male nurse students in my class.  The sample analyzed that there was a 2.5% increase in male nurses since 2008-2018 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2019). 

         Reliable and valid means of measuring data are important in providing accurate details of the sample study. In order to provide data results, tools and instruments need to be reliable and valid.  As Houser (2018) defines " Reliable instruments measure a variable with precision and consistency" and "Valid instruments measure in a manner that is accurate and truthful".   He also further explained that an instrument can be reliable buy yet not valid.  Both of these instruments must be present in order for the data to yield confident results (Houser, 2018). Chen (2021) also mentioned that instruments are important in finding nursing research competence specially in assessing its targeted population.  One tool that can be used to collect data that I was not familiar with was that of the photovoice instrument.   Houser (2021) describes photovoice as "a relatively new method for collecting qualitative data about lived experiences" (p 205). It uses participatory action research where subjects take pictures that shows example of their lived experiences with a reflective description of their thoughts and feelings (Houser, 2021). Although we are very familiar with surveys and questionnaires, I for one have not heard of the Gutmann scale.  The responses made on the survey are progressive where if the person agrees with one statement, the assumption is that he also agreed with all previous questions in the scale (Houser, 2021, p192). We have seen surveys conducted by the National Council of the State Board of Nursing in our individual state where questions were asked pertaining to employment status, perception of current job and future plans. This survey is seen every time we renew our licenses.

Reference:

Chen, Q., Huang, C., Castro, A. R., & Tang, S. (2021). Instruments for measuring nursing research competence: a protocol for a scoping review.  BMJ open,  11(2), e042325. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-042325

Houser, J. (2018).  Nursing research: Reading, using, & creating evidence (4th ed.). Jones and Bartlett. Chamberlain School of Nursing. NR439. Week 5 Lesson: Samples and Data Collection

Houser, J. (2021). Nursing Research: Reading, Using, and Creating Evidence (5th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.  https://ambassadored.vitalsource.com/books/9781284254730 Links to an external site.

 Links to an external site. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2019).  Brief summary of results from the 2018 national sample survey of registered nurses.  https://bhw.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/bureau-health-workforce/data-research/nssrn-summary-report.pdf