Perceptions of Job Happiness of Nurses Working in Hospitals

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to investigate factors that influenced the sense of job happiness of nurses who worked in hospitals and to obtain suggestions for retention management. Methods: A self-administered questionnaire was completed by 41 nurses, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 nurses to collect data for text mining analysis. Results: The analysis results indicated that nurses who were happy with their jobs were motivated to continue working as they gained psychological happiness from being thanked by patients, gained confidence in what they did, and built social relationships with their families and patients. The results also indicated that the perceptions of nurses who were unhappy with their jobs were related to the attitudes and behaviors of their supervisors toward their subordinates and not primarily related to external variables. Conclusions: There is a need for further reliability and validity testing and empirical research on the components of factors that influence happiness using quantitative methods, with a focus on nurses in Japan.