Male nurses in Hainan reconstruct professional values across varied career paths

Male nurses working in five tertiary hospitals in Hainan, China, described their professional values as changing repeatedly rather than following a single predetermined course. A qualitative narrative inquiry involving 15 nurses found that career events could become turning points in different ways, depending on how individuals interpreted them, the relationships surrounding them, organizational responses and workplace conditions. The study identified four broad phases of value reconstruction, four career orientations and a combination of personal, professional and sociocultural influences that shape how nurses understand their work.

The researchers recruited participants purposively from five tertiary hospitals between January 2023 and January 2025 and collected data through semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The analysis combined within-case narrative reconstruction with cross-case thematic synthesis, guided by Clandinin and Connelly’s three-dimensional narrative space of temporality, sociality and place. Reporting followed the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research, or COREQ.

Participants entered nursing through three distinct pathways: active choice, passive reassignment and what the researchers termed blind choice. Practical considerations often influenced these decisions, including employment security, advice from family and reassignment through China’s college-admission system. The three entry patterns did not describe a single shared starting point.

Instead, they reflected different ways in which participants came to nursing and the circumstances that shaped their initial relationships with the profession. After entering nursing, participants’ accounts described four recurring interpretive phases: blurred professional cognition, value exploration, value differentiation and establishment, and professional-value consolidation. These phases represented context-dependent temporal patterns within individual career narratives rather than a fixed, universal or linear sequence.

The findings therefore present professional-value reconstruction as a dynamic process embedded in career experience rather than as a one-time decision. The study also identified four career orientations among the nurses: technical expertise-oriented, managerial advancement, stable commitment and turnover-prone. These orientations described the directions participants associated with their current careers, but the research did not establish that they followed automatically from the length of a nurse’s career.

The same experience could carry different meanings for different people and could contribute to different orientations depending on personal resources, social relationships, organizational responses and workplace contexts. Critical career events were often interpreted as turning points, yet their significance was not fixed. Participants’ accounts indicated that an event’s meaning could depend on how it was understood, who was involved and how the workplace responded.

Individual resources, critical events, organizational support, workplace context and gender-related sociocultural influences interacted in the participants’ explanations of value change. This interaction is central to the study’s account of why similar experiences did not produce uniform careers or professional orientations. Gender-related sociocultural influences were one part of the wider set of factors that participants identified.

The study’s background notes that male nurses can encounter gender stereotypes and challenges in forming professional values, while also emphasizing that little is known about how those values are formed, challenged and reconstructed across careers in Chinese hospitals. The narrative evidence shows that participants understood their professional roles through more than technical expertise or workplace structure alone, including the social meaning of being a man in nursing. Because this was a small qualitative study limited to 15 male nurses in one Chinese province, the findings should not be treated as population-wide estimates or as proof that the four phases and orientations apply universally.

The inquiry offers an in-depth, temporally and contextually grounded interpretation of the participating nurses’ experiences. Its findings may inform individualized and gender-inclusive professional support, but the evidence does not establish the effectiveness of any particular support program or demonstrate causal effects among male nurses generally.

Subject of Research: Narrative inquiry of how 15 male nurses in five Hainan hospitals reconstruct professional values across their careers

Article Title: Professional value reconstruction and perceived influences among male nurses in Hainan, China: a narrative inquiry

Article References: Yang, L., Huang, S., Ming, Z., Qu, J., & Zeng, Y. (2026). Professional value reconstruction and perceived influences among male nurses in Hainan, China: a narrative inquiry. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05532-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05532-9

Keywords: male nurses, professional values, narrative inquiry, career development, Hainan, China, gender in nursing, qualitative research, hospital nursing, workplace culture, Professional, value