Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the Career Growth Scale for Nurses

The purpose of this study was to develop the career growth scale for nurses (CGSN) and evaluate its psychometric properties.

This study was conducted in four phases: (1) creating a pool of potential items through a qualitative design; (2) developing a preliminary scale using a modified two-round Delphi process; (3) refining the preliminary scale to finalize the scale using a cross-sectional survey; and (4) evaluating the psychometric properties of the final scale using another cross-sectional survey. A sample of 858 registered nurses from 12 general hospitals was recruited for this study.

The final scale consisted of 17 items categorized into three factors: career goal progress, professional ability and attribute improvement, and career promotion and prestige increase. The three factors accounted for 75.4% of the observed variance in career growth. The overall Cronbach's α was .96, and the intraclass correlation coefficient was .92. The content validity index was .97. Confirmatory factor analysis showed acceptable model fitness.

These results showed that the CGSN has good psychometric properties and can be used to evaluate specific career growth among nurses. This new instrument can further help nurse managers and clinical nurses themselves assess career growth and identify unsatisfactory aspects of growth, thereby designing tailored training programs and evaluating the effectiveness of such interventions.