By Ann Marie Aliotta, contributing writer
Despite the increasingly high demand for nurses and increased enrollment in baccalaureate nursing programs, there is an alarmingly high attrition rate among new graduates. Some studies report as many as 60-70 percent of new nurses leave their jobs within the first year of practice.
An ongoing study at Oakland University is attempting to discover whether certain personality traits have an impact on attrition rates in particular professions, including nursing.
Titled “Understanding Empathizing-Systemizing Characteristics and Their Impact on Attrition of Students,” the study is looking not only at nursing, but at students in social work, engineering and other disciplines, specifically comparing empathizing attributes, which are common among students who choose a profession like nursing, with systemizing attributes, more common among engineering students.
“Obviously, as the nursing shortage continues to grow, understanding how to match qualified persons to nursing program openings is essential,” according to Barbara Penprase, Ph.D., RN, CNOR, associate professor, School of Nursing and co-author of the study. “
The study hypothesizes that students self-select major areas of study related to how systemizing or empathizing they are. “The research does support this,” Penprase said. “Nursing students have the highest empathizing scores of all students.”
Interestingly, the longer a student is educated in nursing the more systemizing the characteristics become, Penprase said. “Another interesting point is that even though student nurses become more systemizing, their empathizing characteristics do not decline significantly.”
Engineering students have the highest systemizing characteristics, and the men in the nursing program record statistically higher systemizing characteristics than their female counterparts. “Some research has stated that people with higher empathizing characteristics will have higher compassion fatigue (burnout) quicker, so in the future we are hoping to explore that as well,” she added.
Working with Penprase on the study as a primary investigator is Dr. Barbara Oakley, associate professor in the School of Engineering. Reuben Ternes from the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and Dr. Dana Driscoll, assistant professor, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, are also included in the study, which received a $1,200 grant from OU. Data has already been collected from approximately 2,000 students and the study, which began in February 2011 and will conclude in February 2012.
The study focused on whether empathizing and systemizing characteristics are important factors underlying the attrition of students in nursing, engineering and other disciplines.
There are many reasons why newly graduated nurses choose to leave the practice so early in their careers, from lack of psychological empowerment to the inability to handle the high stress of technology to higher patient acuity work settings.
“The results will help us understand what factors might be important to predicting success in selected fields of study, “ Penprase said. “These results also may prove to be important for more general researchers in trying to understand the human condition.”
