This method engages the investigator as a risk taker and as a "knowing
place." Risk taking necessitates decision. Decision imposes confronting
ambivalence in one's self. The ambivalence of wanting to be
"all-at-once" responsible and dependent. Superimposing an already
accepted and acceptable structure on data is safe feeling. Approaching
the situation or data openly, letting the structure emerge from it, not
deciding what to look for, being willing to be surprised, give feelings
of excitement, fear, and uncertainty. There exists the possibility that
our humanness may include the dilemma of our not being able to perceive
the messages of our data, that we will not be able to merge with it and
become more. The question arises, Are we knowing places that can relate
to otherness and intuitively synthesize knowledge? This process of
accepting the decision to approach the unknown openly is experienced as
an internal struggle and we become consciously aware of our rigidity and
satisfaction with the status quo. Conforming to the usual, in this case
positivism, gives a security that is not easily relinquished despite the
advantages of actualizing our unique responsible freedom.
Russell's metaphorical phrase, "windows always open to the world,"
depicts the sought state of mind. His elaboration on this phrase gives
the flavor of the process of preparing the mind. He says, "Through one's
windows one sees not only the joy and beauty of the world, but also its
pain and cruelty and ugliness, and the one is as well worth seeing as
the other, and one must look into hell before one has any right to speak
of heaven."[12] Pain, cruelty, ugliness, hell seem appropriate words to
convey seeing our {71}long-cherished ideas and values, our security
blankets, as only false gods. Nietzsche in speaking of confrontation of
one's values said, "And now only cometh to him the great terror, the
great outlook, the great sickness, the great nausea, the great
seasickness."[13] So this human methodology seeks a condition of being
in the investigator. The investigator must be aware of her own angular
view and democratically open to giving the angular views apparent in the
data, the called for representation.
The first phase of this method of research correlates well with the
struggle experienced by me in clarifying my approach to patients in
public health, medical-surgical, and psychiatric mental health
situations. In these situations, one truly has to struggle with
democratically keeping one's windows open to the world. And this is a
continual process. Having experienced this struggle in clinical nursing
made this approach to research valid and meaningful to me.
Preparing the mind for knowing in clinical or research endeavors may be
accomplished by several means. One means is by immersing one's self in
dramatic and literary works and contemplating, reflecting on, and
discussing them as they relate to the knower's already known, in this
case, nursing practice. In clinical or research nursing the selection of
literary works to stimulate the opening of one's human view is based on
their presentation, depictions, and descriptions of man's nature. In
literature authors share their thoughts as men and present possible ways
men may view and relate to their worlds.