Occupational anxiety in nurses: Scale development study

The aim of this study was to develop the Occupational Anxiety Scale for Nurses to be used in determining the occupational anxiety levels of nurses and to perform psychometric analyses. The population of the methodologically designed study consisted of 4402 nurses working in 13 hospitals including public, private and university hospitals in Istanbul. The sample of the study consisted of 1162 volunteer nurses who were reached by random sampling method among the nurses working in the hospitals. The research data were collected between July 2022 and October 2022 using the Personal and Occupational Characteristics Information Form, the Occupational Anxiety Scale Draft for Nurses and the equivalent form of the Job Stress Scale. IBM SPSS 28 and R programming language were used for data analysis with %95 confidence interval. The validity of the scale was evaluated using content, face and construct validity, and reliability was evaluated using item-total correlation, Cronbach's Alpha coefficient, halving, test-retest and equivalent form methods. The content validity index of the total scale was 0,92. The construct validity of the scale, Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were studied in two separate homogeneous samples. Before the Exploratory Factor Analysis, 3 items with item-total score correlation values less than 0,5 were removed from the draft scale. The KMO sampling compatibility coefficient of the scale was 0.959 and Bartlett's Test χ2=17469,178 (p<0,000). The scale with a total explained variance of %56,31, 27 items and 4 factors were determined as task-centered anxiety, management-centered anxiety, occupational risk anxiety and occupational gain anxiety. The fit of the factor structure was confirmed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The fit indices were CMIN/df 3,8584, GFI 0,9177, CFI 0,9174, SRMR 0,0570, RMSEA 0,0660 and it was determined that the model was compatible with the factors. The Cronbach Alpha value for the reliability of the scale was examined for all factors and 2 items with item-total correlation values less than 0,5 in the "occupational risk anxiety" dimension were removed from the dimension and the scale was finalized as 25 items and 4 dimensions. The total Cronbach's Alpha coefficient for the reliability of the scale was calculated as 0,939 and the range for the sub-dimensions was 0,815-0,857. Significant correlations were found between the Spearman-Brown and Guttman Split-Half reliability coefficients of 0.892, parallel form validity (r=0,487, p=0,000) and test-retest analysis (r=0,994, p<0,01). The Occupational Anxiety Scale in Nurses was developed as a 5-point Likert-type scale consisting of 4 dimensions and a total of 25 items. It was found that the mean total score of the Occupational Anxiety Scale was high (3,775±0,736), and the mean scores of the sub-dimensions of task-centered anxiety (3,553±0,846), management-centered anxiety (3,916±0,836), occupational risk anxiety (3,537±0,949) and occupational attainment anxiety (4,094±0,780) were high. It was determined that there were significant differences between the total and sub-dimension mean scores of the scale between the institution, gender, age, educational status, professional experience and the unit where the nurses worked (p<0,05). As a result, the scale developed in this study can be used as a valid and reliable measurement tool to determine the occupational anxiety of nurses.