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Abstract
Aim To administer the Smith Intuition Instrument to a sample of registered nurses to clarify its factors and test convergent validity.
Methods The Smith Intuition Instrument (27 items), a subscale of the Miller Intuitiveness Instrument (18 items), and demographic questions, were posted to 1,000 registered nurses in January 2006.
Results With a response rate of 79% (n=79), the findings are preliminary. Principal component factor analysis with orthogonal varimax rotation resulted in four factors accounting for 70-8% of variance: spiritual connections (373%), reassuring feelings (14.6%), physical sensations (12.5%) and bad feelings (6.2%). Eigenvalues ranged from 1.1 to 6.7 and factor loadings ranged from 0.705 to 0.887 An 18-item instrument emerged with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.896 and a range of 0.806 to 0.892 for each factor. Pearson's correlation between the two intuition measures was 0.520.
Conclusion Psychometric evaluation demonstrated construct validity, convergent validity and reliability, and clarified the factors. The Smith Intuition Instrument is a valid and reliable tool for measuring nurses' use of intuition in clinical practice.
Keywords
Instrument development; Intuition; Research methods
These keywords are based on the subject headings from the British Nursing Index. This article has been subject to double-blind review. For author and research article guidelines visit the Nursing Standard home page at www.nursing-standard.co.uk. For related articles visit our online archive and search using the keywords.
INTUITION IS DESCRIBED as an important type of nursing knowledge (Paterson and Zderad 1988) and a valid way of knowing in clinical practice (Rew 1988). Intuition in clinical practice is linked to the expert nurse and is formalised in Banner's (1984) novice-to-expert discussion with the expert incorporating intuition at the bedside. Several definitions of intuition are linked to decision making. Intuition is defined as 'a component of complex judgment' (Hew 2000), and as an 'unstructured mode of reason inland global knowledge' (Himaya 1991). It is knowing something or deciding to do something without having a logical explanation. The inability to provide rationale for an action or decision makes intuition challenging for nurses to describe, explain or openly acknowledge.
In the nursing literature, intuition is recognised as an important component of decision-making theories. Thompson (1999) outlines the two predominant theoretical approaches to decision making: the systematic-positivistic approach and the intuitive-humanistic approach. Both approaches are...