The purpose of this research is to examine beliefs, attitudes, and values regarding nursing. The plan of the research will be to set forth evidence from the professional literature that describes attitudes currently prevailing toward nursing as a career within the discipline, comparing them to personal attitudes, beliefs, and values along these lines and evaluating implications for nursing and nursing education that proceed from these attitudes, with a view toward suggesting possible lines of profession development.
How the nursing profession is to be perceived is of concern from several points of view. Attempts to identify and establish a theory of nursing practice have been hampered by the practical, clinical orientation of nursing activity and the often rule-bound but theoretically inchoate adaptation of social science ideas to clinical practice (Levine, 1995). Bent (1993) urges a nursing theory in terms of feminist social critique, which articulates historical (i.e., institutional, professional) forces of oppression of female-identified career paths with a view toward transforming well-documented institutionally and socially sanctioned absence of self-esteem into a project of "empowerment and caring" by way of questioning and influencing health-care philosophy, priorities, and systems. Levine argues that (for example) nurses should use diagnostic techniques and terms and not couch them in words meant to maintain what is in fact a socially, not medically, constructed hierarchical divide between them and doctors.
To be sure, the literature reflects long-term concern with such patient-care problems as the clinical autonomy and relative institutional authority of nurses, physicians, nurses' aides, hospital management, and the restructuring of the health-care system as a whole (Shindul-Rothschild, 1996; Cullen, 1995; Shindul-Rothschild, Berry, & Long-Middleton, 1996). Additionally, there is evidence of tension within nursing betwe...