EXPLORING CONFORMITY AMONG NURSES: A MIXED

METHOD APPROACH

I. INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

To address some of the knowledge deficits identified in the literature, the following
research questions, as they relate Nurses Conformity across the study, were posed:

1. Demographic
a. Age
b. Sex
c. Highest Educational Attainment
d. Job Position
e. Length of Service
2. What are the nurses conformity levels?
3. How do nurses define conformity?
4. What are the factors influencing conformity?

RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

a. Patient
b. Nurses
c. Hospital Institution
d. Academe
e. Researcher

SCOPE AND DELIMITATION

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Social representation
Systems of values, ideas and practices with a two-fold function; first, to
establish an order which will enable individuals to orientate themselves in their
material and social world and to master it; secondly, to enable communication
to take place amongst members of a community by providing them with a code
for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the
various aspects of their world and their individual and group history
(Moscovici, 1973) In this study it is use as.

II. RELATED LEARNING LITERATURE

III. RESEARCH METHOD

RESEARCH DESIGN

The data analysis will follow a mixed method approach (more specifically, a
subsequential analysis Gelo, Braakmann, &Benetka, 2008). There will be a first
qualitative part (focusing on the content of the Social Representation, by means of
thematic analysis) and then a quantitative part (focusing on the structure, by means
of an ad-hoc software EVOC2000 by Verges, 1992).

SETTING AND POPULATION

A target sample of 100 Registered Nurse will take part in this study on a voluntary
basis. Participants will be recruited through a snowball sampling procedure in a
private hospital and a public hospital. The sampling procedure will run according to
Moscovici recommendation (Galli, 2006) in finding specific social groups within
exploring in depth the research object.

RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS

The researcher will administer a semi-structured self-report questionnaire.

The instrument will compose of two sections:

1. an open-ended question framed to investigate the content of the representation

(In your opinion, what is obedience? and In your opinion, what is
disobedience?);
2. an exercise of free associations based on the hierarchized evocation technique
(Verges, 1992 ), to disclose the structure of the representation. Participants will be
asked to associate five nouns and five adjectives with the inductor word and to rank
them by importance. In order to allow a better disambiguation of the answers
provided, subjects were asked to briefly explain their choices of nouns and
adjectives, (Fasanelli, Galli, &Sommella, 2005).

By using this instrument, the researcher will obtain a data corpus that can be
treated qualitatively through a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and a data
set (structure of the representation) that will be analyzed through Evoc2000
software (Verges, 1992).

DATA COLLECTION

To protect the welfare and rights of participants involved in the study and to
uphold ethical and legal responsibilities, ethics approval for the study will be
seek from each of the participating hospital institutions. Those who will
participate in the research will give their consent while in possession of all the
relevant information necessary for them to make a proper choice and all
participants will be given assurances regarding anonymity and confidentiality
of the data.

All questionnaires will be completed anonymously and will be returned to a

secure keeping that could be accessed only by the researcher. No identifying
personal information will be recorded on the questionnaire. Fieldwork will take
place over 2 months, with data being collected sequentially from the two sites.

DATA ANALYSIS

The content of the data of the instruments will be studied through the thematic
analysis method (Braun & Clarke, 2006). This method will be applied to the open
questions' data set. On each single data set (one for obedience and one for
disobedience) the aim was first to provide some labels which refer to the collected
open answers (Level 1-coding), secondly to identify groups of labels which have
similar meaning and cluster them into themes (Level 2-coding), and finally to clarify
the relationships among the themes into a concise coherent narrative which
connects the emerged themes. All two levels of coding will be devised with
reference to something significant in the data related to the research question.

The second component, that is the structure of the representation, will be recreated
by inserting the words, results of the free associations, in Evoc2000 and running the
software. Before this operation, the terms will be placed into semantic categories or
lemmas. These categories are the result of matches between all the words with
similar meaning according to the explanation given by the participants (Why have
you chosen X?).

Evoc2000 software runs according to the TCN (Abric, 2003; Verges, 1992) crossing
two possible criteria for prototypicality: the frequency of appearance and the rank of
its importance, as in the average position in which it is classified.

As Fasanelli et al. (2005, p. 113) remind us, only the intersection of these two
[qualitative and quantitative] criteria allows for the identification of the statute of
constitutive elements of the social representation being studied. Three
independent judges will have to complete the analysis on obedience and
disobedience. Each judge will work first individually; then afterward all of them will
share their analysis. When the accord was complete within the three judges, the
result of the analyses will be considered.