This study considered the employment characteristics and decisions of individuals who were registered nurses with the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Registration is valid for a period of three years and individuals currently registered and sampled could be one of three categories; they can be currently working as nurses, they can be employed in an alternative occupation or they can be out of the labour force. The survey intended to collect additional information on employment characteristics to that which are found in a more general labour/employment survey such as the labour force survey. This was done in the context of the nursing occupation to investigate if more detailed information on employment characteristics can increase understanding on individual employment decisions. The survey asked detailed questions on current employment including detailed and specific questions on their current nursing job and, for those who were not currently in nursing, questions on previous nursing employment. Questions on respondents’ job satisfaction were included including satisfaction with respect to three aspects of patient care. Questions were also asked on intentions to leave their current nursing job, move within nursing jobs, return to nursing or a non-nursing job (if not currently in nursing). The survey also included a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) which is a stated preference survey instrument where respondents are asked to choose between hypothetical jobs. The DCE methodology is a useful technique to elicit both strength of preferences and variations in preferences across different sub-groups of individuals where there might not be enough variation in revealed preference data. In this survey the technique was used to elicit underlying trade-offs between pecuniary and non-pecuniary job characteristics of nursing employment.

Data is at individual level for NMC registered nurses. Raw data comprises of [N=2077 nurses in nursing employment] and [N=340 nurses not currently in nursing]. Data was from a postal survey. Respondents were recruited through an insert placed in the Nursing and Midwifery Council in-house magazine. Inserts were placed at random blocks within the magazine run. The magazine run was printed by post-code. This was done over 2 separate magazine runs in October 2007 and January 2008. 64,000 inserts were placed in total (10% of the magazine run) inviting individuals to get in touch to be part of the study. An accompanying advert in the magazine also invited those without an insert to use a web-based survey to join the survey. This web survey was a reduced version of the paper survey (as advised by our web-survey team). There were 2 alternative paper questionnaires depending on whether individuals responded to recruitment as currently in nursing or not. Due to the nature of the discrete choice experiment, 2 versions of the DCE section of the survey were integrated into the main body of the survey. This means there are in total 4 different surveys (2 employment groups- nursing and out of nursing, and 2 versions of the DCE within each sub-group).