Personality Factors and Professionally-Relevant Behaviour in Practicing Nurses. Summary of the Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

The title of the doctoral thesis is „Personality Factors and Professionally-Relevant Behaviour in Practicing Nurses”. The research has been carried out with the aim : to explore the parameters of professionally relevant behaviour, personality factors and their interrelation in practicing nurses, as well as to identify the differences in professionally relevant behaviour and personality factors in practicing nurses with different education, age and nursing experience. The study sample consists of 484 nurses from different healthcare institutions in different regions of Latvia with the age within 21 - 66 age interval, the mean age in the sample is 42 and the mean nursing experience - 20 years. The theoretical part of the work contains summary of the scientific literature and the studies related to stress and coping as well as the survey of theories concerning stress coping strategies. The literature on emotional intelligence, the locus of subjective control and professionally relevant behaviour has also been analysed. In order to achieve the study aim and to prove the hypotheses, the quantitative research methods were applied using several research instruments: the survey of socio-demographic indicators of the sample, a questionnaire to determine the significance of professionally relevant behaviour parameters; Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory, subjective control test (J.Bazhin, J.Golinkina and A.Etkinds, J. Rotter’s test modification), Lazarus R.S. and Folkman S. Ways of Coping test. The obtained data indicate that the nurses employ both emotion-oriented and problem-oriented coping strategies equally; the nurses show relevantly high indicators of emotional intelligence, intrapersonal competence, in particular; the external locus of subjective control is characteristic to 40% of nurses; there exist several statistically significant intercorrelatons of personality factors; there are statistically significant differences between the personality factors and the parameters of professionally relevant behaviour in/for nurses with different age and nursing experience. The doctoral thesis contains 21 tables, references to 122 scientific literature sources. The volume of the work excluding the appendices is 111 pages, appendices - 7 pages.