Abstract :
Ethnocentrism on the part of health care workers has been documented in the literature and has lead to misdiagnosis, mistreatment and undertreatment of culturally diverse individuals worldwide. Aversive Insidious Racism and Ingroup Favoritism theories were used as the guiding framework for this study. Two hundred and sixty-eight female nurses from a large, urban, multi-service hospital in the United States were surveyed to identify those psychosocial variables (age, gender and culture status of the client) which enhanced and/or inhibited their predicted reactions with clients and which have the power to contribute to unethical decision making and less than ethical client care. The findings of this study, which is the first to examine nursesʹ predicted self and colleague reactions to multiple client variables concurrently, demonstrated that Client Gender as a main effect was not significant in itself when examining self and colleague predictions. Client Age as a main effect was significant for self predictions, p < 0.006, and for colleague predictions, p < 0.000. Client Culture as a main effect was significant for self predictions, p < 0.001 and for colleague predictions, p < 0.001. Many two-way and three-way interaction effects were significant.
