DESIGN: Exploratory and corelational.

METHODS: Participants completed the Questionnaire for Faculty's Attributes (QFA) and the Professional Activities Scale for Nursing Faculty (PAS). The QFA was used to examine the 14 attributes of nursing faculty, and the content validity was validated by a pilot study and a panel of experts. The PAS was used to measure the quality of professional activities of nursing faculty. The items of the PAS describe the ideal professional activities of nursing faculty as identified by a qualitative study (Murakami, et al., 2002), and participants rated the degree of achievement for each item. The PAS has satisfactory reliability and validity (Yamashita, et al., 2004). The instrument packets were distributed to 1577 nursing faculty randomly sampled in Japan. The answers were returned by mail and they were analyzed statistically, including multiple regression analysis.

FINDINGS & IMPLICATIONS: Eight hundred and thirty one (52.7%) nursing faculty responded, and 546 valid data were analyzed. A stepwise multiple regression analysis was conducted in order to identify the important factors for the quality of professional activities of nursing faculty, with the 14 attributes as independent variables and quality of professional activities as the dependent variable. The results indicated that quality of professional activities had strong relationship with 6 of these 14 attributes (adjusted R2=.469, F=59.034, p<.001), and the beta weight of "clinical competence" (Beta=.334, p<.001) was the largest among that of the 6 attributes . This showed that clinical competence is the most important factor for the quality of professional activities of nursing faculty.