The structural components of the situation of nurses in Hungary

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to assess the socioeconomic and sociocultural status of Hungarian nurses. In the research team working at the Department of Social Sciences, the Faculty of Health Sciences, Semmelweis University, by 2015, the idea surfaced that it would be worthwhile to perform a complex socioeconomic and sociocultural study of this social group. We managed to have a sample representative of educational attainment and residence (N = 682). The survey was conducted with a structured questionnaire of 119 questions, 1,195 items, which was filled out in every county by nurses working in three areas: inpatient care, outpatient care, and general practitioner’s office. The analysed data indicate that nurses are recruited from the lower social strata. This background has a definitive impact on their future careers, both in an existential and in a cultural way. Nurses have persistently arrived from the same background in the past decades (Pearson’s R sig = .244), and have attained the same qualifications (Pearson’s R sig = .204). There is a remarkably significant disparity between the perceived real social situation and the desired social situation, which, on the one hand, explains the genesis and nature of social discontent, and on the other hand indicates the difficulties of solving the problem. Only 3.8% of nurses assess their own social prestige similar to that of the doctors’. The social position of the nurses shows multidimensional and multileveled status inconsistency. First and foremost, we can find a relatively low ascribed and an adequately low achieved social position. This is coupled with a social self-image that, alluding to different (mainly work-related) factors, holds a significantly higher social status as desired and acceptable.