A strategy for surveying nursing practice in institutional settings.
Two major obstacles encountered when surveying nursing practice in institutional settings are obtaining a representative sample and collecting an adequate number of observations at a reasonable cost. Past efforts to deal with these problems are reviewed briefly, and results are reported from a two-stage mail survey of a national sample of critical-care nurses. The first stage involved attempts to procure a list of staff nurses from head nurses of critical-care units at 240 randomly selected institutions. An 86% response rate was obtained. The second stage involved mailing questionnaires to a random sample of 600 critical-care nurses listed. Completed, mailed questionnaires were obtained from 87%. Little evidence of bias due to administrative selection and/or volunteerism was found in the lists of staff nurses. An analysis of membership in professional nursing organizations indicates that more than one half of the nurses who responded to this survey would not have been included had the sample been selected from organizational membership lists.
D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods*; D006742:Hospital Bed Capacity; D006801:Humans; D007362:Intensive Care Units; D009732:Nursing Care; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital; D012494:Sampling Studies; D012956:Societies, Nursing; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires