Qualitative Research In Nursing

Nursing research is an essential element of nursing practice as it allows nurses to gain nursing knowledge and develop theory which guides practice. In other words, nursing has evolved both as a discipline and practice through the use of knowledge from other disciplines, the expansion of knowledge and skills in clinical practice, as well as through nursing research and inquiry. As noted by Keele (2011), the clinical practice of nursing primarily is how to address individual patients’ subjective conditions. Therefore, in most cases, nursing research is pre-occupied by how to improve clinical practice of nursing by addressing “individual preferences and environmental variables that are not amenable to simple quantitative analysis” (Pullen, 2000,

89). In other words, the fact that quantitative research accommodates the assumption that there exist a single reality which can be measured and that knowledge is discovered rather than constructed (Burns & Grove, 2006), makes it too rigid in understanding the complex nature of culture in nursing research. According to Cameron et al. (2010), qualitative research is considered as not only more flexible and open to alternative methods of understanding influence of culture, it is also easy to adapt to any cultural content, and gives community a high level of control over the research process. This is particularly important in today’s society in which there is a broad recognition that health status is dependent on a number of complex interacting systems (McDowell,

Thus, it is better placed to inform nursing research by approaching health issues as subjective factors determined by individual differences in socioeconomic status, spiritual beliefs, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc. (see Nursing Council of New Zealand, 2005). In other words, to understand the concept of cultural safety which is based on the premise that health status is not determined by a single factor, qualitative research allows nursing research to approach health problems as a subjective matter. The subjectivity of qualitative research therefore helps nursing research and ultimately nursing practice to move away from analyzing health determinants using linear models based on cultural essentialist approaches that perceive individuals from various ethnic groups as