Social perception of nursing professional assessed by different scales.

The purpose of this experiment was to scale the social perception of nurses through the methods of magnitude estimation, category estimation and cross-modality matching (line lengths). The study participants were high school and undergraduate students, active and retired medicine, psychology, nursing and dentistry professionals. Results revealed that: (1) the characteristics neat, responsible, clean, careful and efficacious occupied the first positions in terms of nurses' social perceptions, while useless, shameful, dishonest, irresponsible and hateful occupied the last positions on all scales obtained by the different direct psychophysics methods; (2) the scale of nurses' social perception is valid, stable and consistent and (3) the rankings resulting from the three methods produce highly concordant positions of perception for the different adjectives.