Absenteeism among hospital nurses: an idiographic-longitudinal analysis.

For several months, nurses completed ratings of the degree to which certain events relevant to absence were present during each of their scheduled workdays. The event ratings for days when the nurses decided to be absent were then compared with those for days when the nurses attended. As expected, certain events, such as ill health and tiredness, tended to covary and proved to be consistently related to absenteeism across nurses. Also as expected, some events that were not especially relevant for the nurses as a whole, like having a sick family member or friend and concerns about previous poor attendance, nonetheless emerged as being relevant to the absence behavior of certain individuals. Finally, some events were consistently related to the nurses' expressed desire to be absent but not to actual absences. We discuss these differences from two perspectives, one emphasizing the role of attribution bias and the other, a two-stage process in which such bias has no major role.

Severity of withdrawal in subjects exposed to a combination of alcohol and minor tranquillisers.

Fifty patients suffering from the alcohol dependence syndrome were detoxified over a 10-day period using a reducing regime of chlordiazepoxide. Twenty-four had been consuming minor tranquillisers together with alcohol prior to admission. The severity of the withdrawal syndrome was assessed daily but no differences were found between the 26 who had taken alcohol alone and the 24 who had taken a combination of alcohol and drugs. Four from each group had a transient hallucinosis and none had fits.

A reevaluation of the absenteeism-job satisfaction relationship.

Previous reviews of the relationship of employee absenteeism to job satisfaction have largely neglected the size of the relationships reported and the artifacts that can affect statistical tests of significance. This paper applies the F. L. Schmidt-J. E. Hunter (1977, Journal of Applied Psychology, 62, 529-540) model of validity generalization in assessing the nature and strength of the relationship of absence to attitudes. Issues concerning the reliability and validity of absence measures are addressed, correlations between absence and job satisfaction are compiled and summarized, and an agenda for future research is set out. Considering the reliability estimates reported for the Frequency, Attitudinal, and Time Lost indices, the Time Lost Index was found to be the most reliable (r xx = .66, SD = .28). Factor analyses of intercorrelations among absence measures provided tentative support for a voluntary-involuntary absenteeism distinction. Combining all measures of satisfaction and all measures of absences, the mean correlation between absence and attitudes is -.09 (SD = .13). In addition to more comprehensive theory-guided multivariate research, future studies should aim toward a reconceptualization of absenteeism as a construct to take into consideration the perceptions of the workers themselves.