Sources of occupational stress among nurses in five countries

Content analysis on nurses’ perception about the nature of occupational stress was performed and results indicate both etic and emic sources of job-related stress.

Abstract

Content analysis on nurses’ perception about the nature of occupational stress was performed in this study to identify emic and etic experiences of occupational stress. Nurses from Hungary, Israel, Italy, U.K., and the U.S., gave their responses in writing to the question: ‘‘What causes you the most stress or anxiety on your job?’’ in the dominant tongue of their country. Results indicate both etic and emic sources of job-related stress. ‘Performing certain tasks’ and ‘type of patients’ were invariant sources of stress across all five nations. Furthermore, nurses in the U.K. reported ‘skillset of staff’ as a source of stress and Hungarian nurses indicated ‘low salary’ and ‘lack of resources’ as sources of job stress more frequently than nurses in the other nations of this study.