A study of professional misconduct of registered professional nurses in New York State for the years 1976 through 1986 using Black's propositions about law

This descriptive study determined the charges and penalties for professional misconduct in relation to the social-life characteristics of the registered nurses in New York State for the years 1976 through 1986. Donald Black's (1976) theory about law was used as the conceptual framework.;A data collection instrument was designed to gather information on the variables by content analysis of the original professional misconduct records maintained by the New York State Education Department. All 142 cases reviewed by the State Board for Nursing, the Regents Review Committee, and the Board of Regents from 1976 through 1986 were included in the study. The statistical procedures used to determine variations in the charges and penalties according to the social-life characteristics of the nurse-offender population were frequencies and percentages, Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficients, and Chi square.;Some support was found for the research statements related to Black's concepts of relational distance, rank, conventionality, and organization; little or no support was determined for those related to culture.;Knowledge about professional nurse disciplinary cases might assist nursing educators and inservice instructors to make curricular decisions about the emphasis and content of law-related issues within the nursing profession. Early intervention in response to deviant patterns of behavior in nursing education programs and in practice may decrease the need for disciplinary action by licensing authorities.;According to Black, law is a quantitative variable conducive to being measured in many ways. The quantity of law may be determined by the number of charges and the severity of penalties. The style of law may be either more penal or more therapeutic. The quantity and style of law may be correlated with the social-life characteristics of plaintiffs and defendents. Black believed that some individuals are more likely to be charged and receive more severe penalties than others. The social-life characteristics of the deviant nurse population were discussed in relation to those same characteristics of the employed nurse population as identified on the 1983 RN survey conducted in New York State. Five of Black's concepts and appropriate variables studied were as follows: relational distance (the number of cases per year, the number of cases per state region, types of penalties per year, and the penalty decisions at each level of review), rank (gender, title/position, and legal representation v. charges/penalties), culture (age, basic nursing education, and years between licensure and charge v. charges/penalties), conventionality (location of basic nursing program v. charges/penalties and impaired nurse penalties v. penalties of nurses with other charges), and organization (employment setting v. charges/penalties).