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BACKGROUND: Despite outcomes studies measuring such variables as job satisfaction, autonomy, professionalism, turnover, leadership styles, and more recently, cost-effectiveness, no consistent relationships have been established between shared governance models and outcomes. OBJECTIVES: To define and develop an instrument to measure the governance of hospital-based nurses. METHODS: The 88-item Index of Professional Nursing Governance (IPNG) was developed to measure professional nursing governance of hospital-based nurses. Psychometric properties were tested with 1,162 registered nurses from 10 hospitals. RESULTS: Content validity after item generation was .95, using Popham's average congruency procedure. Six factors explained 42% of the variance with subscale intercorrelations between .43 and .67. All subscales had a high degree of internal consistency (alphas .87 to .91); test-retest reliability was .77. Construct validity testing showed that scores between shared governance and traditionally governed hospitals were significantly different. A correlation was found between scores on the IPNG and the Hague and Aiken Index of Centralization. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study support the validity of the 88-item IPNG as a reliable instrument for measuring the distribution of professional nursing governance of hospitals.
R. Hess (Thu,) studied this question.