Discussion
The results of this study confirm current knowledge about intuition in nursing and provide a better understanding of the construct and its relation to general trust in intuition and clinical experience. First, these findings confirm the reliability and factor structure of recently-developed measures of intuition in nursing. The hypothesis that use of intuition in nursing is distinct from general trust in intuition was also confirmed. Factor analysis revealed two kinds of domain-specific nursing intuition, Skilled Innovator and Physical/Spiritual, which were not strongly related to domain-general measures of intuition from the psychological literature. The hypothesis regarding the relationship between RN experience and level of intuitive preference was also confirmed. Nurses with more experience preferred their intuition in the field more than those with little or no clinical experience. Follow-up regressions illustrated the unique importance of experience in predicting use of intuition in clinical practice as summarised by the Skilled Innovator factor. In contrast, use of Physical/Spiritual intuition was less strongly related to RN experience and more strongly associated with general preference for intuition.
The current research has several strengths and limitations. The sample contained nurses and nursing students with a broad range of experience in the field, from 0–53 years of experience across various areas of specialisation. The study included several measures of preference for intuition from both psychology and nursing, allowing for theory confirmation and extension in a single study. This work is limited in that the participants volunteered to participate in a study of decision making in nursing, which means that the sample may not represent all nurses. Furthermore, the measures were self-report in nature and do not necessarily reflect the use of intuition in decision making. In future work, researchers should attempt to recruit a representative sample, obtain objective evidence that intuition is not only a preference but is actually being used in clinical situations and use performance-based measures to confirm accuracy in clinical judgement.