Role discrepancy among nursing services personnel in the tertiary care setting

The problem of the study was to determine differences between perceptions of ideal role behaviors and actual role behaviors of registered nurses and licensed vocational nurses employed in tertiary care settings. This quasi-experimental descriptive study was based on the conceptual framework derived from role theory. An instrument consisting of demographic data and a survey questionnaire was developed to measure role perceptions against actual roles of nurses. Subjects' (N = 141) responses were compared with actual existing data from a Time and Motion Study. The hypotheses were tested using the ANOVA statistic with the Tukey test for post-hoc analysis. Statistically significant differences were found in the testing of Hypothesis 1 (p < .001) across the three variables of direct, indirect, and general care. For Hypothesis 2, there were statistically significant results (p < .05) for the categories of direct care and indirect care. There was no statistical significance(p> .05) for the category of general care.