Aim: To explore the relationships among self-efficacy, information literacy, social support and career success of clinical nurses and identify factors influencing clinical nurses' career success in northwestern China. Background: Understanding the influencing factors of career success is important for the professional development of nurses and the improvement of clinical nursing quality. Many influencing factors of career success have been identified, but there is no large-scale research on the relationships among self-efficacy, information literacy, social support and career success of clinical nurses based on Kaleidoscope Career Model. Studies examining the association of the four factors remain limited. Methods: A total of 3011 clinical nurses from 30 hospitals in northwestern China were selected in the cross-sectional survey, and the response rate was 94.71%. The clinical nurses completed the online self-report questionnaires including self-efficacy, information literacy, social support rating scale and career success scale. The data were analysed by SPSS23.0 statistical software using t test, analysis of variance, Pearson's correlation and multiple linear regression. Structural equation model (SEM) was used to analyse the influencing factors of career success using Mplus 8.3.
Results:The career success of clinical nurses in northwestern China was at a medium level. The linear multivariate regression analysis showed that self-efficacy (β = .513), social support (β = .230), information support (β = .106), information consciousness (β = À.097), information knowledge (β = .067), information ethics (β = À.053), hospital grade (β = .118), marital status (β = À.071) and age (β = À.037) entered Chao Wu and Lin-yuan Zhang contributed equally to this work.