Aims To continue to test the psychometric characteristics of The Nursing Bodywork Instrument by analyzing the responses of registered nurses who care for or cared for adult patients in acute care hospitals and to describe the item and subscale scores, internal consistency, and test‐retest reliability and construct validity of the instrument. Design An instrument development, descriptive design was used. Methods The Nursing Bodywork Instrument was administered via email to a convenience sample of registered nurses. The anonymous online survey, consisting of 121 bodywork items, used a seven‐point strongly disagree to strongly agree scale to elicit responses. Results A total of 82 completed instruments was obtained. Item statistics indicated agreement with many direct care actions. Findings on nurse characteristics were limited due to Institutional Review Board restrictions. Test‐retest reliability on 121 items showed no statistically significant difference on all items. Interscale correlation coefficients for the 19 subscales ranged from moderately strong to strong associations; all were statistically significant. Discriminative or known‐group validity was supported by a significant difference in years of acute care experience between new‐to‐practice and seasoned nurses across three subscales. Conclusion The Nursing Bodywork Instrument needs additional testing. Item reduction is needed. Expert evaluation by nurse administrators is needed to consider clinical applications of the items and subscales of the checklist. Implications for the Profession Using an instrument to document bodywork could reveal aspects of nursing’s daily work and make it more visible, discrediting the idea that basic nursing work is unskilled and ordinary. The subscales of the instrument might be useful to nurse administrators when examining nursing workload and other important outcomes. Impact Nursing work in acute care hospitals is recognized, but the specifics of nursing work may not be consistently documented. The items and subscales of the Nursing Bodywork Instrument might assist nurse administrators of healthcare systems to increase documentation of nursing’s bodywork and demonstrate its value to person‐centered care.
Wolf et al. (Thu,) studied this question.