Saturday, 15 January 2005 - 12:00 PM

This presentation is part of: Poster Session II

Factors Influencing Nursing Home Social Workers' Job Satisfaction

Purpose: Given the current and growing demand for social work practitioners with training in aging, it is important to understand the experiences of social workers already employed in these settings in order to promote practices and policy that will increase their retention. This study addresses this need by applying a theoretical model developed by Price (2000) to investigate factors contributing to nursing home social workers’ job satisfaction.

Methods: Self-administered questionnaires were mailed to the attention of the Social Work or Social Service Director of 675 nursing facilities, randomly sampled from a federal database (OSCAR). Respondents were asked to indicate their agreement (1=strongly disagree; 5=strongly agree) with a series of statements describing personal (job involvement, positive affect and negative affect), organizational (organizational influence, autonomy, resource inadequacy, workload, role ambiguity, role conflict, routinization, distributive justice, promotional chances, supervisor support, coworker support, and pay), and environmental (perceived external job opportunities) characteristics. Nearly all of these measures were developed by Price and colleagues and have demonstrated adequate internal consistency reliability (alpha > .70) in their research (Cyphert, 1990; Kim, 1996; Price 2000). Scales developed by others include Poulin’s (1995) coworker support scale (alpha = .95) and an organizational influence scale developed by the present researchers. Job satisfaction was measured with a six-item scale (Price, 2000), using the same agree/disagree response categories, and also demonstrates acceptable internal consistency reliability (Cyphert, 1990; Kim, 1996; Price & Mueller, 1986).

Results: A Multiple Regression, using hierarchical entry, predicted nursing home social worker’s mean job satisfaction by the personal (k=3), organizational (k=12) and environmental variables (k=1). The final model accounted for 54.6% of the variance in job satisfaction (p<.001). The personal variables, entered on Step 1, accounted for 27.5% of the variance in job satisfaction. The organizational variables, entered on Step 2, accounted for an additional 26.9% of the variance (p<. 001). The environmental variable, perceived job opportunities, entered on Step 3 and was non-significant. Three predictors exhibited significant, positive main effects on job satisfaction: job involvement (p = .000; t = 3.96); supervisor support (p = .001; t = 3.35); and distributive justice (p = .014; t = 2.47). An additional three predictors exhibited significant, negative effects: negative affect (p = .001; t = -3.48); routinization (p = .002; t = -3.17); and ambiguity (p = .032; t = -2.15).

Implications: The findings have implications for the retention of social workers, as well as for social work practice in nursing home settings. Most notably, this research identified several organizational characteristics that may encourage job satisfaction among nursing home social workers: the presence of a supportive supervisor (most often, the facility administrator); pay, and other rewards, that are commensurate with experience, education, levels of responsibility and effort; and clarity and variety in job duties. Two personal variables may also be influential: negative affect and involvement. Social workers who perceived themselves as highly involved in their jobs and scored lower on the negative affect scale tended to have greater job satisfaction.

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