Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Publisher

BioMed Central

Source Publication

BMC Nursing

Source ISSN

1472-6955

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-024-02186-3

Abstract

Background

The nursing shortage is driven, in part, by the critical shortage of nursing faculty. Consequently, qualified potential nursing students are being turned away from nursing schools each year. The preeminent issue influencing the United States nurse faculty workforce shortage is salary; financial compensation is higher in clinical and private-sector settings than educational settings. The purpose of this study is to describe current full-time nurse faculty salary, sources of income, and perceived need for more income, as well as the feasibility and acceptability of research focused on full-time nurse faculty salaries, so to guide future nursing faculty workforce research.

Methods

Using a cross-sectional study design, full-time nursing faculty working in a Midwestern state in the United States completed a survey inclusive of fixed choice and free text response options focused on income (individual gross, faculty, and secondary), demographics, and feasibility/acceptability of the survey instrument. Descriptive statistics were used to describe salary, sources of income, and perceived need for additional income. Feasibility and acceptability were evaluated by descriptive statistics examining three feasibility and acceptability questions, and by comparing demographic differences between participants who answered income questions compared to those who did not using t tests, x2 tests, and Wilcoxon signed rank tests.

Results

One hundred and eighty-three full-time nurse faculty completed the survey in six weeks, representing 27% of the full-time nurse faculty workforce in the state. Over half of participants, 57%, reported having another job(s) in addition to their full-time faculty position to support basic living expenses. Most respondents reported willingness to share financial/salary data and viewed the survey to be acceptable.

Conclusions

Research focused on nursing faculty salaries was feasible and acceptable to those who chose to participate in the study. Perceived income needs may be an important factor driving career decisions for nursing faculty. Future research should focus on delineating how salary influences the decision to enter or stay in the nursing faculty workforce. Further, this study can inform policy recommendations on how to best measure and report nurse faculty salary and the gap between clinical salaries and faculty salaries.

Comments

Published version. BMC Nursing, Vol. 23 (2024). DOI. © 2024 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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