Assessing the Relationship between Nursing Occupational Prestige and Social Health

One of the features that any profession possesses is that it occupies a social status relative to other professions. The present paper discusses the relationship between nursing occupational prestige and social health.
This study was a cross-sectional research that was conducted during year 2015. The study population consisted of 200 nurses working in hospitals located in Hamedan, Iran. Convenience sampling was employed to select 200 nurses, who were asked to respond to the 25-item Keyes’s Social Health Questionnaire and the 16-item Nursing Occupational Prestige Questionnaire. Higher scores reflected better social health and occupational prestige. The quantitative analysis of this study was carried out using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS).
The results showed that the nurses’ mean score of social health and nursing occupational prestige were respectively 43.88 ± 9.18 and 44.83 ± 25.14. Social health was significantly related to occupational prestige in nurses (r = 0.15, P = 0.04). Overall, 66.5% of the nurses were reported to have average occupational prestige and 75.5% were believed to have average social health. There was a statistically significant difference in scores of occupational prestige among the nursing post (P = 0.01), job satisfaction (P Nurses’ social health deserves special attention. Effective social health promotion strategies should be considered for promoting social health, particularly in occupational prestige.