Studying Nursing Practice

Abstract

With publication of two seminal articles nearly 40 years ago, Dickoff, James, and Weidenbach (1968a, 1968b) launched a dialogue among nurse scholars about nature of theory and its relationship to research and practice for our professional, as opposed to academic (Donaldson & Crowley, 1978), discipline. Identification of broad constructs forming our discipline's metaparadigm (Fawcett, 1984) and their general acceptance (Hinshaw, 1987), together with Carper's (1978) explication of fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing, have given cohesion to structural bedrock of nursing knowledge development. Over 4 amazing decades, multiple nurse scholars have refined this bedrock through continuing discussions of nursing metatheory; further, they have elaborated its interior structure with a range of theories and concepts, nursing taxonomies, methodological advancements, and important landmark studies. As a science, nursing has come into its own and beyond, adding important contributions to interdisciplinary knowledge and knowledge generation (Donaldson, 2001). As a professional discipline, nursing may be unique in explicit inclusion of its field of practice, that is, nursing (the verb), as a fundamental construct of its metaparadigm. In our research, this construct has been reflected most commonly as an intervention or a process. In this first issue of Volume 22, articles in Research and Theory for Nursing Practice (RTNP) share a common theme-all focused on study of nursing practice. Yet all use or highlight a unique approach, clearly fitting within metaparadigm of nursing and nursing's ways of knowing. In lead article, Regan and Liaschenko present an original derivation of a research method for eliciting human motivations and actions that reveals the complex interplay between clinician's beliefs and interpretation of meaning that motivates clinical action. Based on projection theory and drawing from psychology's Thematic Apperception Test, they describe development and application of method in a study of obstetric nurses and detail approach required to analyze resulting qualitative data. In a more traditional approach, Sidani uses a quasi-experiment to evaluate patient-centered care as a process-oriented aspect of acute care nurse practitioners' practice in hospital settings. Outcomes of functional status, self-care ability, and patient satisfaction among medical-surgical patients were evaluated after discharge from one of eight acute care hospitals in Canada. …