Replicated testing of the Nursing Technology Model

The purpose of this study was to replicate the testing of a model to explain complexity of nursing care in the ambulatory care setting. The Nursing Technology Model (Verran & Shaw, 1986) has as its theoretical base a sociological perspective of organizational analysis in which technology is viewed as the antecedent to organizational structure. The model includes materials technology as the nature of the ambulatory care client and knowledge technology as the principal type of activities pertinent to nursing care delivery. The characteristics of these technology types were organized into causal paths to explain complexity of care. Two ambulatory care sites were sampled to obtain a client sample of 610 rating sets. Results were essentially similar to earlier research with R2s for complexity indexes at the same level of .34. Only one regression equation evidenced instability in regression coefficients and the R2. Analysis of findings indicated that other variables, such as some aspects of structure, may need to be further specified in the model in order to increase its explanatory power.