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Changes By Accident Or Design: An Analysis Of Trends In American Nursing From A Feminist Perspective (1870-1988), Gloria Giaveno Straughn

Doctoral Dissertations

This exploratory study analyzed trends in American nursing from 1870-1988. The study used three kinds of graphical analysis (timeplots, scatterplot matrices and residual plots) to informally test fifteen hypotheses regarding nurse supply. Nurse supply was broken into two categories: nurse requirement, or the actual number of nurses employed in nursing at any one point in time; and nurse availability, or the potential number of new nurses needed to be produced or recruited. The hypotheses focused on two broad empirical research questions: "How many nurses are there?" and "How many nurses are enough?" Feminist conceptual frameworks were employed to inform the …