Research is an inherent component of humanistic nursing. What condition
of humanness is necessary in the nurse for the actualization of
nursing's research potential? This chapter will attempt to share some
brooding and mulling on this problem.
Nurses practice within ever-moving, changing settings where formulated
plans frequently and suddenly go awry. Unexpected patient needs arise.
Powerful others make both reasonable and unreasonable demands. Depended
on others fail us due to human frailty or lack of dependability. The
nurse's setting, her researchable area, is the extreme opposite of her
colleague's, the laboratory investigator's. Her area is beyond research
control measures. Too, it lacks the quiet isolated atmosphere conducive
to contemplation and creative thinking associated with research.
Conversely, it is oversaturated with the "stuff" of meaningful
existence. It can stimulate questions to the frenzy of immobilization.
The human nurse's system can become overloaded. Such overloading
reflects the humanness of the nurse; like all man she can envision
possibilities beyond any human being's ability of fulfillment.
Nurses know there are events in their commonplace worlds that scream for
human interpretation, understanding, and attestation. The question
becomes "how." This "how" depends on more than concretes and events in
the nurse's setting. This "how" depends on relevant "ifs." The
meaningfulness of the nursing world will be actualized conceptually "if"
this is supported by institutional economic and administrative planners,
other nurses, and intradisciplinary colleagues. For knowledge available
and visible to nurses in the health setting to be preserved,
conceptualized for durability, it needs to be valued by the
institutional health community. Still, most necessary to its duration is
the appreciating of this knowledge by the nurse, herself. {52}