This cross-sectional study with quantitative and qualitative approaches, seeks to apprehend social representations from nurses about working night shifts through identifying the central core and peripheral system. Free evocations produced by 25 nurses from a public university hospital in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in January of 2008 were collected from the inducing expression, "Nurse's Night Work" and subjected to the four houses framework analysis. The results showed the social representations structure with the following central elements: responsibility, arduous, stressful, suffering, and autonomy. Its peripheral elements were ethics, financial need, double shift, overload, and initiative. These results indicate the need for reflection in order to develop strategies which contribute to personnel management policies considering the specificity, subjectivity, and complexity of nocturnal work.
Nursing; Nocturnal work; Social representations
