Factors Associated with Registered Nurses Job Satisfaction

Factors Associated with Registered Nurses Job Satisfaction
Background:   Hospitals are being increasingly pressured to improve efficiency, that is, to produce higher quality medical care while reducing or maintaining costs.  Thus, understanding hospitals’ costs is important for administrators.  Nursing labor represents the largest single variable cost in hospitals, making expense accountability among nursing departments critical.  An important consideration is labor turnover, defined as the rate at which nurses start and leave a company over a given period of time.  There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that job satisfaction plays a key role in affecting turnover propensity among hospital-based nurses.
Data:  The organization fielded a large random sample survey of employed, hospital-based registered nurses in the local labor market.  The original survey instrument included 72 questions covering topics of education, satisfaction, demographics, and employment setting for registered nurses.  There are 2,286 observations.  A programmer constructed a set of variables for an analysis.  The main “outcome” variable for this analysis is job satisfaction (satcat).  This is a categorical variable constructed from a scale, that captures whether a nurse reported being extremely or moderately satisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, or moderately or extremely dissatisfied.  Additional information was collected with respect to demographic and work-related attributes and is summarized in the document titled: Module 4 Discussion Data.
Questions:
Drawing on your experience: Tell us about an issue in which you evaluated either patient experience or employee satisfaction. (What question(s) were you trying to answer?  What types of factors were you examining to see if there was an association?  What managerial decision (if any) came out of the analysis?)
Which factors exhibit a statistically significant association with employee satisfaction?  Are the observed patterns or…