TITLE:
Gratitude, or the Positive Side of the Relationship with Patients. Development and First Validation of New Instruments: A Scale of Gratitude Perceived by Operators and a Scale of Support Offered by the Gratitude Expressed by Their Patients
AUTHORS:
Mara Martini, Daniela Converso
KEYWORDS:
Gratitude, Relationship with Patients, JD-R Model, Scale Development
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.6,
April
25,
2014
ABSTRACT: The relationship with patients/users is a
crucial dimension for helping professionals. It is nevertheless mostly analyzed
in its negative connotation, that’s to say as a possible cause, for example, of
the burnout syndrome, while very few are research works that take into account
the positive side of the relationship, as a resource more than a problem, and
even fewer are the instruments to measure it. The aim of the present work is
the development and the analysis of the characteristics of a scale to measure
the gratitude expressed by patients perceived by operators and of a scale to
measure the perception of support that gratitude by patients/customers offers
to relieve the fatigue of daily commitment and return significance to their
work. The two scales were developed and then integrated into a questionnaire
including items regarding the negative side of the relationship (exceeding requests
from patients) and the Customer-initiated support scale (Zimmermann
et al., 2011). The questionnaire was filled in by 267 nurses in Piedmont,
Italy. Descriptive analyses on each item, exploratory factor analysis,
Cronbach’s alpha, analysis of variance, and bivariate correlations were
conducted. Both scales show a one-factor solution. The independent sample
t-tests highlighted differences between men and women and between people who
have families to care for and people who do not. Bivariate correlations
signalled a positive relationship between both the gratitude scales and the
Customer-initiated support; no relationships are evident with the scale of
exceeding request from patients. A limitation of the work is the dimension of
the sample: a more extensive administration of the questionnaire is currently
in progress that will also permit to more deeply investigate the factorial
structure of the scales. The scales will allow filling a gap in measuring a
central work issue for helping professions.