The nurse student, recently arrived in her experiential world, is awed
with the need to be cognizant of multitudinous factors. At this initial
introductory phase one could say her "being" as a nurse is programmed or
imprinted with: It is your responsibility to report and attend all the
things that influence the response and comfort of those for whom you
care. This programming supports and is supported by any already existing
tendencies within the nurse student toward unrealistic, perfectionistic
expectations of self.
Then in research courses, usually positivistically geared, her
programming jams. Her system is fed: Select out, isolate, focus down on
a single question, limit your variables, establish a protocol of
operation, control for reliability and validity, tunnel your vision, and
safeguard objectivity. The jamming is the result of the human nurse's
capacity to see relationships between the part and the whole. Human
intelligence, as a condition of humanness, demands this relating of one
thing to another. Often such relating is intuitive, human, based on much
thinking for purposes of understanding and solution. Yet, often it
cannot be substantiated fully and conceptualized logically at specific
times, therefore it is subjective.
To highlight the obvious in the above I attempted facetiousness. Many
nurses acutely aware of the complexities, contradictions, and
inconsistencies of their nursing worlds have struggled and used the
positivistic method in research studies. Hence, they have isolated a
researchable question, stated their basic assumptions, hypothesized
outcomes, selected samples, established experimental and control groups,
formulated methodologies, searched out and utilized appropriate
findings, and have made recommendations. Usually these research efforts
have advanced scientific knowing and knowledge of existents within the
health-nursing situation. And yet, often these efforts have discouraged
the research wonderment of the nurse interested in the nature and
meaning of the nursing act and how the event of nursing is lived,
experienced, and responded to by the participants. These positivistic
research methods have made available answers. Still, they have not
answered the questions most relevant to nursing practice and to nurses.
These nurses were certain that man generally could not be prescribed for
interpersonally; he was not predictable, not yet an automaton. Faced
with alternatives men often surprised. Consequently these positivistic
approaches to studying human events, unless one forced one's data
crowbar style, always terminated with a kind of miscellaneous category.
Man's undeterminedness makes him all-at-once frustrating to study,
impossible to distinctly categorize, and excitingly mysterious and the
most worthy focus of nursing research. {53}