Nurse Researcher最新文献

Background: Adults with intellectual disabilities are not often asked to participate in health research. This may be because researchers perceive them as unable to participate meaningfully with or without significant support and anticipate difficulty in obtaining ethical approval because of issues concerning consent and mental capacity. This means that the voices of adults with intellectual disabilities are often missing from health research and their experiences and views are unexplored.

Aim: To share successful strategies for accessing, recruiting and collecting data from a purposive sample of adults with intellectual disabilities from a study that used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

Discussion: IPA is a person-centred, flexible and creative approach to research. Meaningful collaboration with people with intellectual disabilities, their families, carers, advocacy group managers, specialists in intellectual disability services and research supervisors was vital to the success of the study. The authors share practical strategies for including people with intellectual disabilities, from the perspective of a novice researcher who is an outsider to the field of intellectual disability.

Conclusion: It is important to include people with intellectual disabilities in healthcare research. This article presents a framework to support researchers outside the specialist field of intellectual disabilities in achieving this.

Implications for practice: Personal views and perceptions of healthcare are important if health services are to meet individual needs. Adults with intellectual disabilities often receive poor healthcare and have poorer outcomes. This will be perpetuated without their input into research. People with intellectual disabilities can make valuable contributions to the evidence base.

Background: The literature has described researching people you know or being an 'insider' researcher in a variety of settings. However, the literature has largely focused on the challenges and risks associated with researching in your own community, and has neglected to articulate the benefits for research studies and participants.

Aim: To summarise the literature looking at the role of the insider researcher and explore reflections about insider research made by participants in a constructionist grounded theory study.

Discussion: This article reflects on the participant-researcher relationship in a grounded theory study exploring staff experiences of working in children's blood and cancer centres in New Zealand. It uses participants' reflections to further the discussion of the benefits of being an insider researcher, in the context of interviewing your own colleagues.

Conclusion: The challenges of being an insider researcher include the potential for power differentials in relationships with participants, the risk of assumed understanding and the challenge for the researcher of managing emotional burden. These challenges can be minimised by writing reflective memos throughout the research. The benefits of being an insider researcher include the ability to rapidly develop rapport with participants, and participation as a cathartic and therapeutic process for participants.

Implications for practice: Reflective practice is critical and essential when undertaking nursing research as an insider researcher.

Background: Choosing how to answer a research question requires an understanding of philosophical and theoretical assumptions and how these inform a study's methodology and methods. This can be a challenge for all researchers, but for novice researchers, such as doctoral candidates, this can feel like an overwhelming task. Ensuring there is clear alignment between philosophy, theory, methodology and methods is an essential part of the research process, that enables research to be undertaken with clarity and integrity. This alignment must be a good fit for the research aim, and to ensure the researcher's intrinsic values and beliefs do not affect the analysis undertaken.

Aim: To describe the alignment between qualitative description and naturalistic inquiry and how it was applied to a doctoral candidate's exploration of the meaning of safety for people with experience of admission to an acute mental health unit.

Discussion: Understanding the alignment between qualitative descriptive methodology and naturalistic inquiry provided a clear pathway for the doctoral candidate.

Conclusion: The assumptions that underpin a methodological approach need to be unpacked to understand how to answer a research question effectively.

Implications for practice: Qualitative description, informed by naturalistic inquiry, offers a practical way to explore and answer research questions.

Background: Action research (AR) provides a robust platform for collaboration to develop and evaluate nursing practice. It results in several outcomes, including changes in evidence-based practice, the development of research capacity, and the evaluation and sustainability of interventions, all of which can be seen as benefits compared to other approaches. However, the methodology involves cycles of action, reflection, theory and practice, so it can be challenging to maintain momentum when engaging with teams over long periods of time.

Aim: To offer strategies for maintaining momentum when using AR in nursing research.

Discussion: Three strategies for maintaining momentum when undertaking AR are covered. Theory, literature and experience of using AR in which the strategies of 'connecting as people', 'working with the context' and 'understanding the influence of the leadership team' made a considerable difference in maintaining momentum and are drawn on.

Conclusion: Maintaining momentum in studies that use AR can be arduous, but critical reflection enables researchers to identify and overcome the challenges that arise. Researchers undertaking AR can apply the three strategies provided or other approaches to maintain momentum during all phases of a study.

Implications for practice: Maintaining momentum in AR studies is more successful when researchers connect with those with whom they are undertaking research. It is advantageous for nurse researchers to reflect on and understand the influence of the leadership team and context rather than try to adapt them to the study's or their own needs.

Background: Developing and working through a PhD research study requires tenacity, continuous development and application of knowledge. It is paramount when researching sensitive topics to consider carefully the construction of tools for collecting data, to ensure the study is ethically robust and explicitly addresses the research question.

Aim: To explore how novice researchers can develop insight into aspects of the research process by developing vignettes as a research tool.

Discussion: This article focuses on the use of vignettes to collect data as part of a qualitative PhD study investigating making decisions in the best interests of and on behalf of people with advanced dementia. Developing vignettes is a purposeful, conscious process. It is equally important to ensure that vignettes are derived from literature, have an evidence base, are carefully constructed and peer-reviewed, and are suitable to achieve the research's aims.

Conclusion: Using and analysing a vignette enables novice researchers to make sense of aspects of the qualitative research process and engage with it to appreciate terminology.

Implications for practice: Vignettes can provide an effective platform for discussion when researching topics where participants may be reluctant to share sensitive real-life experiences.

Background: The use of photo-elicitation interviews (PEIs) has increased in popularity across a range of disciplines including healthcare. Although qualitative researchers have embraced PEIs as a creative way to explore people's experiences of their lives and environments, the methodological and practical aspects of using photographs have received little attention in the literature.

Aim: To discuss the use of PEI techniques, including sourcing and using photographs.

Discussion: The authors discuss definitions of photo-elicitation, and explore the value of and difference between using photographs taken by the researcher and those taken by participants. They consider methodological issues in the context of a small-scale focus group study that used PEIs to explore young women's conceptualisations of teenage and older motherhood.

Conclusion: Using photographs in research is far more complex than providing participants with cameras or presenting them with photographs. Researchers must be aware of the potential bias in the choice, selection and sequencing of photographs, as well as the methodological considerations associated with PEIs.

Implications for practice: This article highlights the value of using photographs in qualitative research and presents some of the methodological issues that nurse researchers need to consider when designing and conducting research using photographs.

Background: Vignettes are regularly used in nursing research and education to explore complex clinical situations. However, paper-based vignettes lack clinical realism and do not fully recreate the pressures, sights and sounds of clinical settings, limiting their usefulness when studying complex decision-making processes.

Aim: To discuss the approach taken by the authors in developing and implementing audiovisual vignettes to collect data remotely in a qualitative study.

Discussion: The authors describe how they created audiovisual vignettes for a qualitative 'Think Aloud' study exploring how critical care nurses decide whether to restrain agitated patients with varying degrees of psychomotor agitation. They discuss the practicalities of filming, editing and hosting, as well as the theoretical and clinical background that informed the creation of the vignettes.

Conclusion: Audiovisual vignettes are a cost- and time-effective way of remotely exploring decision-making in challenging environments. This innovative method assists in studying decision-making under simulated clinical pressures and captures data about how people make complex decisions.

Implications for practice: Audiovisual vignettes are an innovative tool for collecting data and could also be used in educational settings and offer the opportunity to explore complex clinical decision making remotely. Clinical accuracy is essential for immersing participants and simulating an environment and its pressures. The method could be further enhanced by making vignettes responsive to participants' decisions.