The EIN NPO has been awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to conduct a national study of nurse faculty work-life. Reliable data on the current status of the nation’s nursing schools with regard to factors contributing to the faculty shortage will be critical to motivating, designing, and implementing effective strategies for change. While useful school-level data are available from several sources, data on representative samples of individual faculty members for establishing national norms are lacking. The national survey of nurse faculty will be designed to provide benchmark measures for assessing interventions supported by Evaluating Innovations in Nursing Education (EIN), provide a yardstick for nursing programs around the country to compare their faculty to those at similar institutions in their region, and yield a baseline snapshot for guiding and assessing the progress of national efforts to improve the work-life and retention of nurse faculty.
The project will study approximately 6,000 nurse faculty members employed at 300 randomly selected nursing education programs representative of the population by program type (BSN and ADN) and region of the country. Domains of questionnaire items in the survey will include characteristics of faculty workload, opportunities for professional development, satisfaction with aspects of the faculty role, levels of job stress and burnout (and underlying causes), and terms of work (e.g., salary, tenure status). Items and measures will be drawn from prior studies (e.g., NLN and NLN-Carnegie faculty surveys) whenever possible.
