Job satisfaction among nurse assistants employed in nursing homes: An analysis of selected job characteristics

The quality of life of residents of nursing homes depends heavily upon the work of nurse assistants (also known as nurse aides). However, beyond basic demographic data, little is currently known about this highly important category of care providers. This study explores the relationships between selected job characteristics and job satisfaction of 138 nurse assistants employed in nursing homes in Ohio. Factor analyses reveal four dimensions among these job characteristics. These dimension are labeled supervision, personal recognition, family/ work conflict, and qualifications. Only qualifications fail to show a significant correlation with the nurse assistants' levels of job satisfaction. The strongest relationship is with supervision. The implications of the findings for job satisfaction and job performance among nurse assistants are discussed.     

SELF-CONCEPT AS THE ORGANIZATION OF ROLES: Importance, Centrality, and Balance

Data from a set of middle-aged working men and women from the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan area are used to explore three different ways that individuals organize their self-concepts and infuse personal significance into their roles. Five sets of findings include the following: (1) both men and women identify many of their roles as personally significant, especially work and family roles; (2) men tend to attribute more importance and centrality to the role of worker than do women, while women tend to assign greater importance and centrality to most other roles; (3) different combinations of importance, centrality, and balance influence worker, spouse, and parent role satisfaction and identity meanings; (4) worker role centrality tends to have negative effects on spouse and parent role satisfaction and identity meanings; and (5) worker role importance and spouse centrality have a positive influence on self-esteem while worker centrality has a negative impact on self-esteem. The findings suggest that importance, centrality, and balance appear to be independent dimensions of personal significance that individuals ascribe to their roles.     

Identifying meaning and perceived level of satisfaction within the context of work

OBJECTIVE: The primary objectives of this study were to identify sources of meaning for individuals within the context of a work environment, and to compare varied sources of meaning for individuals with high and low work satisfaction levels. METHOD: Participants were chosen based on satisfaction levels in employment, full-time employment status within an organization for at least one year, and diversity in the work setting. Data were gathered through a series of interviews and observations of the participants' workplaces. A comparative analysis of transcribed interviews was conducted by the researchers and with an expert occupational therapy faculty panel. From these analyses, the researchers developed work narratives for a mechanical engineer, a high school teacher, an employee of mechanical services, and a career service counselor. RESULTS: Emerging themes from the work narratives indicated that the various meanings employees found in work had an effect on their perceived levels of job satisfaction. Participants conveyed that organization identification, financial benefits, independent decision-making, reciprocal respect, opportunities for creativity, and maintaining significant relationships outside of work enhanced meaning and satisfaction. CONCLUSIONS: The worker role is a significant source of an individual's identity, meaning, and satisfaction in life. Professionals in various fields can work with employers to develop meaningful work environments for increased job satisfaction, greater motivation for work, increased productivity, and decreased employee turnover.     

Constructing the Nature Experience: A Semiotic Examination of Signs on the Trail

This paper is an exploratory examination of the role of signs perceived along nature trails in parks and wooded settings and the ways in which they shape the nature experience for individuals. Literature was examined to define what it means to experience nature, the values and meanings people place on nature, hikers’ expectations, and tourism and park management practices. Sign objects, their underlying meanings, and the interpretation of signs along the trail were examined in the context of the existing theory based on semiotics, particularly the work of Peirce. Through a series of hikes, we found that signs contribute to the satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and meaning making in outdoor environments. Areas for further investigation are discussed.     

Facilitating communication: how to truly understand what patients mean

1. Patients experience greater satisfaction with nursing care when they are truly understood. 2. Being aware of taken-for-granted meanings and committing the time to seek clarification and explore meanings are two basic principles that can facilitate understanding. 3. Techniques nurses can use to facilitate understanding include restating what was heard to ensure understanding and to demonstrate active listening, asking open-ended questions, and checking for understanding.     

Nursing home satisfaction,biography, and the life worlds of psychiatrically disabled residents

The stereotype of nursing home life as a uniformly dismal experience is pervasive in American culture, but this examination of the attitudes of psychiatrically disabled residents calls this generality into question. Residents in this study exemplified a range of opinions about the nursing home — some were clearly satisfied or dissatisfied, but most were ambivalent. In this paper, I explore the relationship between nursing home satisfaction and individual interpretive activity through the biographies of three residents. I find that how residents made sense of their lives was powerfully linked to their perspectives on nursing home residence. In particular, satisfaction was linked to how each resident viewed his or her illness, institutionalization, and life purpose. Understanding the phenomenological contributors to the meaning of nursing home life is essential to appreciating how it is that residents in the same environment can have vastly different outlooks on their surroundings.     

Moving Past Picket Fences: The Meaning of “Home” for Public Housing Residents

The literature on the meaning of “home” has generally focused on creating lists without giving much attention to the context that shapes meanings. Recently, scholars have argued that to understand “home” it is important to know the range of meanings that different people in different contexts give it. In this article, we focus on the meaning of “home” for public housing residents and consider how they construct the meaning of “home” and if they find that meaning in public housing. Our findings suggest that respondents consider their public housing residences to be “home,” and they construct this meaning using the dimensions of home identified in the literature. However, how respondents used these dimensions were, in some ways, different because of the context of living in public housing. Respondents emphasized the social dimension, and this dimension appeared to organize the other dimensions. As such, our findings support arguments that context matters to the meaning of “home.” They also suggest that policymakers need to broaden their understandings of public housing, as places that can be “home,” and use this understanding when making decisions about housing transformations.     

Bridging gaps between mind, body, & spirit. Healing the whole person.

Fifty percent of visits of primary care providers are for psychiatric problems making it desirable to screen for mental, addictive, or behavioral disorders at the level of primary care. Psychiatric/mental health nurses prepared at the master's level to practice in the blended clinical specialist/nurse practitioner role are well placed to treat or collaborate in the treatment of people who present with symptoms of physical or psychological problems. The role of the clinical specialist/nurse practitioner is evolving in response to changes in health demographics, epidemiology, scientific and technological advances, and changes in managed care. Advanced practice nursing education must continue to anticipate and meet on-going changes and challenges.     

Degree and Direction of Sexual Desire Discrepancy are Linked to Sexual and Relationship Satisfaction in Couples Transitioning to Parenthood

Many new parents are concerned that they have different levels of interest in sex than their partner. Understanding the role of desire discrepancies in their sexual and relationship satisfaction could help promote adjustment. In community couples, larger desire discrepancies have been inconsistently linked to lower sexual and relationship satisfaction. However, these studies rarely accounted for both the degree and direction (e.g., which partner has higher desire) of the discrepancy. We surveyed 255 mixed-sex new parent couples to assess their sexual desire, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction. Using polynomial regression with response surface analysis (RSA), we found that desire discrepancies between partners (i.e., when partners were more mismatched as opposed to matched on their levels of sexual desire) were associated with lower sexual (but not relationship) satisfaction for both partners. However, the direction of desire discrepancy mattered: Parents felt less satisfied when mothers were the higher-desire partner compared to when fathers were the higher-desire partner. In addition, when partners’ level of sexual desire was in agreement, they were more sexually and relationally satisfied if both partners reported higher compared to lower desire. Results demonstrate the important role of both the magnitude and direction of desire discrepancies in new parent couples.     

The psychiatric technician: trespasser or welcomed ally?

1. The increasing shortage of nurses, higher patient acuity levels, and greater demands placed on nursing to meet standards of care have contributed to the use of psychiatric technicians to alleviate the burden on nursing and ensure the delivery of quality patient care. 2. Psychiatric technicians provide care for a select group of patients under the supervision of the primary nurse. The patients assigned to psychiatric technicians require minimal direct nursing intervention. 3. Psychiatric technicians reported increased self-confidence and self-esteem; the nurses were able to perform more professional nursing activities, increasing their job satisfaction and promoting staff retention; and the patients received high-quality care.     

Pregnant Bodies in Social Context: Natural,Disruptive, and Unrecognized Pregnancy

This article examines the role of social context in the construction of meanings attached to the pregnant body. Analyzing interviews with 42 women who, during the time of the interview, were either pregnant or had given birth to a child within the last 12 months, I explore (1) the role of social context in assigning social value to the pregnant body; and (2) how the meaning attached to pregnancy changes as pregnant women move from one social context to another. I suggest that the role of social context is central to our understanding of how pregnant women are perceived and evaluated by others.     

“They are the reason I come to work”: The meaning of resident–staff relationships in assisted living

This article aims to provide understanding of how direct care workers (DCWs) in assisted living facilities (ALFs) interpret their relationships with residents and to identify factors that influence the development, maintenance, quality, and meaning of these relationships. Qualitative methods were used to study two ALFs (35 and 75 beds) sequentially over seven months. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 5 administrative staff and 38 DCWs and conducted 243 h of participant observation during a total of 99 visits. Data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Results showed that the emotional aspect of caregiving provides meaning to DCWs through both the satisfaction inherent in relationships and through the effect of relationships on care outcomes. Within the context of the wider community and society, multiple individual- and facility-level factors influence DCW strategies to create and manage relationships and carry out care tasks and ultimately find meaning in their work. These meanings affect their job satisfaction and retention.     

The Nature and Dimensions of the Grandparent Role

Abstract

Grandparenting is a fundamental personal and social role. Despite its importance, the nature and dimensions of the grandparent role and its relevance to developmental theory is not well understood. Recently, grandparenthood has been conceptualised as a highly generative activity, thus involving developmental work that previously was attributed to middle adulthood. However, the importance of generativity as a means of avoiding a sense of stagnation in older adults has yet to be thoroughly investigated. Not surprisingly, most studies have concluded that grandmothers and grandfathers find the role to be very satisfying. Nevertheless, the psychological factors that influence this satisfaction remain unclear. Future research is required to examine grandparent satisfaction in terms of grandparents' attitudes and expectations, grandparent behaviours (e.g., child care provision) and the derived meaning of grandparenthood. This research needs to follow an integrated, theoretical approach.     

The impact of internal communication satisfaction dimensions on job satisfaction dimensions and the moderating role of LMX

This paper presents the results of the research on the predictive role of internal communication satisfaction dimensions on job satisfaction dimensions of middle managers from 131 companies in Serbia and the moderating influence of the leader member exchange relationship between middle managers and their supervisors (LMX) on that role. The research has shown that some internal communication satisfaction dimensions have statistically positive impact on job satisfaction dimensions and the moderating effect of LMX has also been noticed.     

The storyscapes of teenage pregnancy. On morality,embodiment, and narrative agency

Young women tell different stories about teenage pregnancies. Their stories are embedded in the storyscape of their environment, which offers a limited set of narratives. Normative discourses influence the stories young women tell about their pregnancies. Social norms and stigma play an important role in the construction of the meaning of teenage pregnancies. However, the embodiment of being pregnant constitutes meaning as well. This paper draws on findings from a qualitative study conducted in 2015 among 46 young Dutch women who got pregnant before their 20th birthday. Our study explores how young women navigate the moral arena when they are confronted with a teenage pregnancy and which role the embodiment of pregnancy plays in the construction of social meanings. The concept of storyscapes visualises how young women are constrained by their embeddedness in multiple storyscapes, defined by different and often contrasting audiences. Nevertheless, our study indicates that the momentum of pregnancy can offer agentic possibilities to take up another position towards their social environment and develop narrative agency.     

Demography or respect?: work group demography versus organizational dynamics as determinants of meaning and satisfaction at work*

This article tests two competing models of meaning and satisfaction at work. First, meaning and satisfaction at work can be influenced by the demographic composition of work groups, especially their racial and gender compositions. Second, meaning and satisfaction can be influenced by management behaviour, especially by leadership in maintaining a productive environment and by respect for workers' rights. We evaluate these determinants, along with more traditional determinants that focus on socio-technical characteristics, using a unique data set derived from content analysing the reports provided by book-length organizational ethnographies (N = 108). Work group composition is found to have only a minor and selective influence on meaning at work. In contrast, management leadership and respect for workers' rights are found to have much stronger and more widespread effects. The well established role of socio-technical factors such as job autonomy as foundations for meaning and satisfaction in work is also replicated in the analysis. When contrasted with both work group demography and traditional job and organizational characteristics, a well run organization is found to be the single most important underpinning for a meaningful and satisfying work life. In the concluding section we develop the implication of these findings for organizational analysis.     

SYMBOLS, STORIES, AND PRACTICES: New Empirical Directions in the Study of Religious Meaning

Over the past three decades, there has been a growing interest in religion's special meaning-making function. At the same time, scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the fact that the meanings evoked by religious symbols, stories, and practices are not universally shared and that they vary by social context. To date, sociologists of religion interested in the problem of shared meaning have not employed methods that can bring together diverse religious meanings and social settings in the same research design. As a result, their work has produced few empirical generalizations upon which a long-term research agenda might be built. In other subdisciplines, such as cultural sociology, researchers have employed new quantitative methods that can empirically connect variations in cultural meanings to variations in social context. This article calls for importing these methodological advances into the sociological study of religious meaning.
There is an enormous irony in the fact that God is in his heaven in the social sciences—or at least a very important section of the social sciences [sociology]—even as he seems to be vanishing from the altars. Michael Harrington, The Politics at God's Funeral     

Living a Calling,Life Satisfaction,and Workplace Climate Among a Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Population

Previous research on calling has resulted in a model that relates living a calling to life satisfaction through job satisfaction and life meaning. However, no research has examined this model in a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) population. With a sample of 171 sexual minority adults, the current study aimed to (a) test the fit of an established model of living a calling and life satisfaction and (b) examine how having a supportive LGB workplace climate functioned within this model. Results revealed an excellent fit of the model and that a supportive LGB workplace climate predicted both living a calling and job satisfaction. In addition, the relation of living a calling to life satisfaction was fully mediated by life meaning and job satisfaction, and the relation of climate to life satisfaction was mediated by job satisfaction. These results suggest an expansion of the potential utility of the calling construct to an LGB population.     

Story sharing: restoring the reciprocity of caring in long-term care

Residents in long-term care facilities often experience an interruption in the reciprocity of caring, inadvertently cut off when they enter the unfamiliar surroundings of a residential health care system. This transition from the give and take of caring to being completely cared for often leads to a breakdown of meaning, a loss of identity, and loneliness. This article addresses how an intervention called story sharing can restore the reciprocity of caring. Beginning with a review of the significance and functions of storytelling and listening, a specific story sharing intervention-the mutual sharing of everyday experiences among nurse aides and the nursing home residents for whom they care-is described. The theoretical and practice implications of story sharing are discussed.     

Pilot study results: the psychiatric RN case manager.

1. It is important to examine client and staff satisfaction with the RN case management (RNCM) model to enhance the quality of care in psychiatric settings. 2. Ninety-two percent of clients surveyed ranked the RNCM care as "excellent" or "above average." Clients valued most the humanistic role of the RNCM and repeatedly commented on the importance of the nurse being caring, genuine, and supportive. 3. RNCMs expressed high satisfaction with their role, which they described as collaborative with the psychiatrist, yet also professional and independent. Psychiatrists expressed a high degree of confidence that clients were receiving excellent care by competent nurse professionals.