Acknowledges Use of Intuition in Nursing Scale (Rew 2000)
The seven-item version of this instrument was administered (α = 0•923). Statements such as ‘There are times when I feel that I know what will happen to a patient, but I don’t know why,’ were rated on a five-point Likert scale.
Smith Intuition Instrument (Smith 2006)
This 27-item questionnaire (α = 0•925) was designed to assess students’ use of intuition. Participants were asked to indicate using a five-point scale how frequently they engage in several behaviours related to the use of intuition. Smith (2007) has most frequently found seven factors in this scale: Good Feelings (‘I get a calm feeling when I know things will be okay’), Spiritual Connections (‘I sense a spiritual connection with my patient’), Reading Cues (‘I read the non-verbal body language of my patient’), Bad Feelings (‘I get an uneasy feeling about a patient’s condition’), Physical Awareness (‘I get a shiver down my spine when I think something is wrong with my patient’), Physical Feelings that Alert (‘I get anxious when I think something will go wrong’) and Sensing Energy (‘I sense energy coming from my patient’).
Results
Data analytic strategy
The first step was replication of the factor structures of the Miller Intuitiveness Instrument (Miller 1995) and Smith’s (2006) Intuition Instrument to assure that the measures were reliable and conformed to the expected factor structures using this sample. Next, the relationship among the three measures of nursing intuition (Miller, Smith and Rew) was examined. Then, the domain-specificity hypothesis was tested by examining the relationships among the measures of intuition preference in nursing and in general. Finally, the experience hypothesis was tested by examining group differences in intuition preference at multiple levels of nursing experience.