A professional commitment scale for clinical nurses: A study protocol

Background: As the largest and most fundamental group targeted by programs developed to improve quality of care, nurses should be the focus of attention in the management of human resources in the field of health care. A review of literature on this subject revealed the lack of scales designed for measuring professional commitment in nurses. The present study was designed to develop a scale to measure professional commitment in clinical nurses and examine its psychometric properties.    Methods: This study will develop a professional commitment scale for clinical nurses within one qualitative and one quantitative step. The first step of the study will entail a review of the literature on the subject and interviews with clinical nurses so as to develop the categories and the items. The second step, the quantitative step, will analyze the items extracted in the qualitative step, determining the features of the topics and factor structure of the scale. The initial scale will be completed by 300 clinical nurses. The correlation among the topics, the construct validity, and reliability of the scale will also be examined in this step.    Results and Discussion: This study will develop an instrument that can measure professional commitment in clinical nurses. Given the lack of instruments for measuring professional commitment in clinical nurses, the findings of this study may be of help to nursing managers, authorities, and the health system in general.