Abstract

• This study was to explore on the rank of stressful events related to the experience of hospitalization. 180 hospitalized patients on surgical and medical wards were asked to rate 49 stress-producing events associated with the experience of hospitalization. Two university hospitals was used as the setting for this study. Because the nature of the events in the stress scale pertain mainly to general short-term hospitalizations, patients in the rehabilitation and psychiatric units of the hospital were not included. Prior to the beginning of the study, three times meeting were held with 12 head nurses and 3 investigators for discussing with the ethics subject related to the study. The pretest was done to determine whether items to use were pertinent or not. According to the result of the pretest, Volicer's Hospital Stress Rating Scale was selected as a study tool for this study. Data collection was used an interview and a card-sorting method. The interviewing was done by two authors and three graduate nursing students. A total 125 completed the card-sorting procedure. The stressful items were ordered from most to least stressful within the categories. Additional information such as; age, sex, marital status, and diagnosis was obtained from the kardex file. The ordered list of items, with mean values, as scored by the total of 125 respondents was significantly accepted at 1% level by Friedman test. (X2=1448.339) The event, "knowing you have a serious illness." was rated highest stressful and (M=41.54) "Being awakened in the night by the nurse" least stressful. (M=14.73) Highly rated items were orderly "Thinking you might have cancer" "Thinking you might lose a kidney or some other organ" "Not being told what your diagnosis is. "Not knowing for sure what illness you have," five lowerly rated items were orderly "Having to eat at different times than you usually do""Not being able to call family or friends on the phone" "Not having friends visit you," "Having strangers sleep in the same room with you." Further analysis of the data was done to ascertain the degree of similarity of judgment between different groups in the sample as to how events should be rated. The sample was divided into two groups according to the demographic characteristics and the degree of seriousness of illness. The rank order correlation was calculated for the two sets of ranks as a measure of consensus between the two groups. The correlations ranged from 0.85~0.99 all indicating a high degree of consensus.

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