Development and Validation of a Professional Socialization Measurement Instrument for Hospital Nurses in Korea

Purpose: Professional socialization (PS) is the process by which people who enter a profession internalize or take in new knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviors, values, and ethical standards and make these a part of their professional identity (Mariet, 2016). The comprehensive educational program is one of the antecedents of PS (Dinmohammadi, Peyrovi, & Mehrdad, 2013). An important aspect of nursing education is to prepare nursing students to become well socialized in their workplace. PS refers to taking on behaviors within cultural norms (Gibbon & Crane, 2018), however, there have been no PS evaluation tools that reflect a Korean sociocultural context until now. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a PS measurement instrument for hospital nurses in the Korean sociocultural context.

Methods: We explored the PS experiences of Korean hospital nurses using a qualitative study and identified attributes of PS using a Delphi survey. From those qualitative and quantitative data, 48 preliminary items were extracted to evaluate PS. A total of 881 data items taken from hospital nurses in Korea was used in this instrument development study. To identify the structure of the concept of PS, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), Monte Carlo method, and multitrait-multimethod analysis were performed using data from 480 subjects randomly extracted from 881 subjects. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was done using data from the remaining 401 cases to confirm the PS structure. For the verification of construct validity, average variance extracted (AVE) and construct reliability (CR) were calculated for convergence validity. Also, we compared AVE values to the squares of the correlation coefficients between factors to verify the discriminant validity of the instrument. For the verification of concurrent validity, the relationships between PS and the Nurses Professional Value Scale (NPVS), Korean version (Moon et al., 2014) and compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue, and burden were analyzed. Test-retest reliability and Cronbach’s alpha reliability analysis were performed on the data using AMOS 24 and SPSS 24.

Results: Finally, five factors; Excellence, Value, Ethics, Recognition, and Innovation with 24 items were extracted. In the CFA, the AVEs of the five factors were from 0.64 to 0.72, and the CRs of the five factors were from 0.75 to 0.85. In discriminant validity, Excellence, Value, and Ethics were not clearly discriminated. The reliability of PS was Cronbach’s alpha 0.955 and the test-retest reliability was Cronbach’s alpha 0.770. The correlations between PS and professional value, compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue, and burden were 0.607 (p<.001), 0.709 (p<.001), -0.081 (p=.017), and -0.561 (p<.001), respectively.

Conclusion: The five factors of PS in this study were somewhat similar to attributes of PS in previous studies. However, “Recognition” and “Innovation” were unique results in this study. These two factors need to be emphasized in nursing education programs, and interprofessional experiences in academia and clinical settings would be one of the programs (Farrell, Payne, & Heye, 2015). The PS measurement instrument needs to be verified for nursing students.