Constituent and Related Factors of Reality Shock Extracted by New Graduate Nurses After Three Months' Practice

Abstract

In this study, constituent factors of reality shock among new graduate nurses are elucidated and other related factors are examined. The subjects were 408 new nurses who graduated from nursing school in 2004 and were working for 24 general hospitals with 500 beds or more in the Tohoku region. We surveyed 62 items to measure reality shock, extracted a relevant factors such as "human relations in the work place," "practical nursing abilities," "physical factors," "psychological factors," "business and condition in the work place," "challenges and enjoyment in the job," "sense of responsibility for the occupation," and "responses to patient deaths." The sampling adequacy of these factors by the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure, the cumulative contribution, and the Cronbach Coefficient Alpha were 0.92, 42.52%, and between 0.67 and 0.92, respectively, which are highly reliable. In addition, it turned out that noticeable reality shock was experienced with "psychological factors" and "practical nursing abilities." The results suggest that their reality shocks are affected by the kind of hospital wards to which they are assigned, the complexity of the specialty they deal with, and how much they wish to leave their jobs.