Date of Award

Summer 2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)

Committee Chair

Julia Knauff

Abstract

As a practicing registered nurse in the intensive care setting, this researcher witnessed an episode of burnout characterized by a public meltdown, crying, and yelling. This sparked an interest in an intervention to combat nurse burnout. Literature was found on gratitude which has been found to increase resiliency. An increase in resiliency, in various populations, has been found to decrease perceived stress and feelings of burnout. This researcher investigated the use of gratitude journaling for 21 days as means to decrease perceived stress and feelings of burnout while increasing gratitude and resiliency. The PSS, GQ, BRS, & BBI tools were utilized in the pre and post-intervention survey. The data collected was compared using a paired t-test analysis. The data analysis found the decrease in mean perceived stress scores and increased mean resiliency scores were statistically significant. Although, both the gratitude scores and burnout scores improved from the baseline data, the changes were not statistically significant. The sample was used from one hospital in the southeastern United States on one hospital unit. A total of 20 participants completed the baseline survey completely and of those participants, 11 completed the gratitude journaling intervention and post-intervention survey. Due to the small sample size and high attrition rates, this study will need to be repeated on a larger scale to establish reliability and validity.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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