Copyright © eContent Management Pty Ltd. Contemporary Nurse (2009–10) 34(1): 10–18. Volume 34, Issue 1, December 2009/January 2010 10 C N C N Development and validation of the Nursing Workplace Satisfaction Questionnaire (NWSQ) GREG FAIRBROTHER Nurse Manager Research & Clinical Policy, Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, NSW, Australia; Research Fellow, Faculty of Nursing Midwifery and Health, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia AARON JONES Nursing Executive Officer, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, NSW, Australia KETTY RIVAS Quality Manager, Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, NSW, Australia ABSTRACT A nursing job satisfaction questionnaire was designed by a project group of nurses seeking a suit- able job satisfaction measure to track as an outcome in a large Sydney hospital-wide models of nursing care project. Existing tools were rejected by the group as overly lengthy, US-biased and over-using respondent assessment of the character of the work environment as a proxy for job satis- faction, or happiness at work. A one-page, 14-item tool was developed after instrument reviewing and facilitated groupwork. The tool reduces to three measurable domains: intrinsic, extrinsic and relational job satisfaction. Exploratory factor analysis (n = 220 responses) confirmed the validity of this ‘three-way’ conceptualisation of nursing job satisfaction. Internal consistency analysis on a larger sample of responses (n = 459) yielded high Cronbach’s Alpha values for all three domains and for the total overall, suggesting a stable and reliable measure. The NWSQ is short, one page, sensibly worded for Australian conditions and yields scoring against three validated domains. It holds significant potential utility as a standard metric for prospective ward-based or institution-wide performance trending. KEYWORDS: nursing; job satisfaction; questionnaires; models of care; reliability; validity BACKGROUND T he Nursing Workplace Satisfaction Questionnaire (NWSQ) was developed prior to the pilot phase of a Models of Care proj- ect conducted at eastern Sydney’s 500 bed inpa- tient tertiary referral facility, the Prince of Wales Hospital (Fairbrother, Jones, & Rivas, 2010). The Models of Care project was implemented in 2002–2004 and involved acute medical and surgical wards at the hospital in an experimental trial of a team nursing model of care against the then standard individual patient allocation model of care. Because team nursing models of care had not been widely used in Australia since the 1980s, the project team were highly concerned with the acceptability of teaming in job satisfaction