J Nurs Acad Soc.  1995 Dec;25(4):741-750.

Development of a Role Conflict Scale for Clinical Nurses

• Kim MS
• Park SY

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop a role conflict scale for nurses in hospitals. The process of study was as follows. The first step was the study of selected literature on role conflict in general and to translate into Korean language the role conflict and ambiguity scale developed by House. From this process, a scale for role conflict inventory -general was made by consulting with two professors majored in educational evaluation and one professor who is an authory on educational administration. In the second step, 24 clinical nurses were asked to describe the situations having job-related role conflict. In the third step, the role conflict inventory-specific was derived from the role conflict inventory-general, and data selected from the step two. The confidence and clarity of this role conflict inventory-specific was strengthed by consulting one clinical psychologist, two professors of nursing college and ten doctoral students of nursing. With this tool being tested, the results are summarized as follows. 1. Reliability Internal consistency reliability was tested by cronbach alpha, corrected item total correlation and correlation matrix. The cronbach alpha level was .94 and one item among 37 items was below .35 and the rest items were .42 above in the corrected item total correlation. There was no negative correlation in the correlation matrix. 2. Construct validity. In the construct validity test, four factors have an eigen value 1.0 over. Factor 1 represented role ambiguity, composed of 15 items with .90 reliability level. Factor 2 represented deficiency of ability and skill, composed of 11 items with .90 of reliability level. Factor 3 represented working environment, composed of 6 items with .85 of reliability level. Final factor represented deficiency of job-related collaboration, composed of 5 items with .69 reliabilty level. These results contribute to measuring the level of role conflict for nurses, and to the managment of the nurses' role conflict.

MeSH Terms

Cooperative Behavior
Humans
Nursing
Psychology