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Nursing research and graduate education
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Nurs Outlook 60 (2012) 259e263
www.nursingoutlook.org
ANNIVERSARY ARTICLE
Nursing research and graduate education Virginia Cleland
Nursing research and its values must be internalized and institutionalized within graduate nursing programs, rather than simply added on as an embellishment.
It is true that nursing, like any other profession, faces problems brought about by external forces-problems that nursing, single-handedly, cannot solve. At the same time, though, there are problems that are within nursing’s power to solve, because these problems are brought about by forces within the profession. We have had opportunities that we have not taken advantage of as effectively as we might have and I am not convinced that we have always used our resources wiselyd especially as these relate to the research and the researchers so very much needed in nursing. For instance, we tend to attribute many of our problems to lack of financial support but, in truth, nursing has received enormous public support. Our financial and faculty resources have been used, however, (1) to produce more and more nurses without enough consideration of their potential for developing serious, long term career commitments; and (2) to prepare nurses for practice without paying sufficient attention to the level of clinical proficiency that employers are entitled to expect. The profession should have given and must now give its highest priority to graduate education and, more specifically, to the preparation of productive nurse researchers, Research is vitally needed in both the process and content of nursing and the optimal organization of nursing services, if we are to achieve quality of care and an employment environment conducive to job satisfaction for the practitioner. Otherwise, it is wasteful to enroll more and more
students in programs that are reported to articulate so poorly with the health systemda problem that in itself needs to be systematically documented. It is also futile to expend large sums of money to alleviate problems unless research has been conducted to determine sufficiently “what” should be done and “how” it can be done. Nurse researchers could study these problems as well as help to convince federal funding administrators, the nursing profession, and university faculty and administrators of the need for planned and sequential research into the: total system of nursing care. We can assume that the financial and human resources for nursing research will probably be quite limited in the present and immediate future. But such economic stringencies can force some realignments and restructuring of programs and systems that may ultimately prove to be more effective than continued support of old patterns. This, then, is an appropriate time for the profession and the faculties of graduate programs in nursing education to seek ways to achieve greater research productivity and efficiency. To this end, I would like to discuss some specific areas for consideration.
Loci of Research Ideally, the university, rather than the service agency, is the locus of choice for initiating formal research studies. Researchers in academic settings can reach out to a variety of health care institutions to conduct clinical research. However, even medicine, with its enormous human and financial resources, tends to develop second-rate research programs in health service institutions that lack close university relationships. The
Dr. Cleland received her M.N. degree from Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, after completing her B.S. at Monmouth College. She earned an M.A. degree from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. from Wayne State University, where she is professor and director of graduate studies in the College of Nursing. This paper is based on speeches given at New York University and the University of Pittsburgh in 1975. This article is reprinted with permission from Nursing Outlook. Cleland V. Nursing Research and Graduate Education. Nurs Outlook 1975; 23(10):642-5. 0029-6554/$ - see front matter Ó 1975 Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2012.06.013
260
Nurs Outlook 60 (2012) 259e263
university, on the other hand, can provide consultant help, critique of ideas by colleagues, and a valid reward systemdall of which health care institutions cannot normally supply. Most important, a research program in a university can be interwoven with an educational program to develop more researchers. In looking at the university setting, we must also consider the number of faculty prepared to teach and conduct research. In 1972, with nearly 780,000 registered nurses employed in the United States, only slightly more than 1,100 possessed earned doctorates.1 And, on the basis of data from ANA’s Council of Nurse Researchers, fewer than 25 percent of these nurses are directly involved in research activities.2 The profession, therefore, should give attention to the possibility of consolidating its nurse researchers into a limited number of university programs. In addition, schools of nursing that do not have a graduate program should not attempt to support a formal research program. Today, the attic-type of lone researcher is so rarely a success that this idea should be rejected as a possible model. If there are faculty members in such schools who do wish to conduct research, they should be urged to seek positions in universities with graduate programs, if at all possible. On the other hand, schools that have a graduate program terminating at the master’s level would be well advised to focus upon the preparation of evaluators and utilizers of research. Within a profession, a good case can be made for such a faculty to concentrate on preparing practitioners who can make appropriate use of research findings. Decreasing the lag between the time when a research hypothesis is well supported and the time when it becomes commonly utilized in professional practice can be a very valid goal in itself. While all master’s programs require research courses, the objective, whether acknowledged or not, is really to prepare the graduate to read research literature critically, to develop and defend ideas, and to stimulate thought and plans for the application of findings. Conducting small studies has value in that it enhances the nurse’s ability to understand and evaluate research, but it does not prepare a principal investigator. I know of no discipline or profession that claims to prepare investigators at the master’s level. In any of them, there is only a handful of research investigators who do not have their doctorate.
Centers of Research I would therefore urge that nursing establish centers of active researchers in university settings where there are doctoral programs of study for nurses. There is no reason why nursing should be any different from other professions and disciplines in which faculty research and the education of future researchers are concurrently developed in doctoral programs.
Many nurse researchers are frankly worried about the number of universities that are reported to be planning to initiate doctoral programs in nursing. Do we have an adequate mass of senior level faculty researchers to permit more than eight to ten such programs at this time? It will not help the progress of nursing as a profession nor the development of the science underlying nursing practice if doctorallyprepared nurses without postgraduate research experience, without clinical depth, and without university-level faculty experience are employed on widely scattered campuses, each one trying to develop a new doctoral program in nursing. I see this restriction on the number of research-doctoral education programs, however, as only a temporary limitation until such time as more doctorally-prepared nurse researchers are available.
Increasing Research Productivity Within a particular university, what can be done to facilitate the nursing faculty’s research productivity? The most important consideration, I believe, is the expectation of the dean and faculty concerning scholarly activity. In this regard many schools seems to progress through three stages. First, no research expectations at all; two, research and writing are viewed as optional activities for some faculty members; and three, research and scholarly writing are essential expectations of all faculty members. (It is my impression that each stage generally coincides with a change in deanship.) At a meeting of project directors of research development grants held at the University of Utah last spring, Marie Holley spoke on research survival and strategies and raised the following questions which can be used to clarify a school’s commitment to research: Is your school willing to reduce its undergraduate enrollment and undergraduate teaching faculty to support faculty research activities and research offering at the graduate level? Do you have recruitment and budgetary plans to increase present ratios of doctorally-prepared to master’s and baccalaureate-prepared faculty members? Is your school willing to provide time for faculty to develop individual research grants and to consider the possibility of dual appointments for faculty in research? In other words, there may be value in considering teaching-research, teaching-clinical, and clinical-research appointments as alternatives. Is the amount of faculty assistance required by graduate students engaged in research taken into consideration in planning faculty-student ratios? Are there plans to support research faculty and staff as part of the regular budget of the school, or is this already being done?
Nurs Outlook 60 (2012) 259e263
Are the numbers of clinical supervision hours for faculty reasonable for the number of credit hours obtained and are these best for student learning?3 To Dr. Holley’s list, I would add one more: “Is the school willing to relate salary increases and promotions to scholarly productivity?” A faculty personnel committee can be very helpful in working with the dean in this area. At my own institution, we are trying to view each promotion and tenure award for the purpose of assuring that the quality of the faculty will improve each year.
Needed: A Reordering of Priorities What other factors influence faculty research efforts? Marella recently studied factors that influence research activity of faculty in graduate programs in nursing.4 She found that when nursing faculty members were asked how they thought the university ranked seven faculty activities, teaching was most important, research second, and publications third. However, when these same faculty members indicated their personal rankings, teaching was viewed as most important, student advisement and counseling second, and research third. Why would student advisement and counseling rank second? Isn’t this related to nursing’s excessively high instructional costs? One can also hypothesize that this counseling and advising related to the femaleness of the occupation. Is is not likely that the long-term effect of excessive counseling will be to create dependency and curb initiative and the development of personal autonomy in students? I tend to view this excessive counseling of students and the excessive refinement of objectives as games some faculties play to avoid doing research. I have looked more than casually at the faculties of various disciplines and professions at my own university and others and have concluded that there is a nearly perfect inverse relationship between the amount of time a faculty spends in research activities and the amount of time spent writing college, program, course, unit, and class objectives. Where faculties are weak on scholarship, they tend to be strong on the writing of objectives. In some schools, at least, there is need for faculty to move beyond objectives and consider less expensive teaching strategies. Audiovisual materials, for instance, are not too commonly used at the graduate level. Yet I recently reviewed a course in research methodology where one instructor and a graduate assistant teach 150 students. Using a variety of techniques, that instructor appeared to have as effective a course and as much student involvement as at my own institution, where we teach the same course with only 15 to 25 persons per section.
261
Similarly, if the teacher uses a tape recorder to record her comments when correcting papers and allows the student to respond to the taped comments, the student will probably receive many more suggestions than would be the case if the comments were handwritten. Such modifications of teaching methods hold considerable potential for freeing faculty time.
Organizing Research Activities Sometimes faculties have agonizing experiences trying to organize their research effort. I believe that the position of director of research is needed. With adequate assistance this position could be combined with that of the director of graduate studies. Graduate schools often combine the dean’s academic and research support roles but, just as often, they separate these positions. At Wayne State University, we have found a center for health research to be a helpful mechanism. At one time, our center operated as a department with faculty assigned to it. This did not work because the research and educational efforts of the college became too separated. Now the center provides support services to research faculty who retain membership in regular departments. By and large, researchers are strongly autonomous persons who do not wish to be organized in any bureaucratic fashion. Rather, they tend to form “clumps,” whereby a principal investigator recruits young faculty and students to work in a specific problem area. The director of our center is also director of research for the college and, as such, is the main spokesperson and defender of research where budgetary and personnel decisions are made. This mechanismdthe center has been tremendously successful in making the university’s administrative officials aware of the research effort in the college of nursing.
Knowledge Areas Instead of trying to organize research or researchers, it is far better to develop a conceptual framework for the curriculum that is derived from a philosophical belief system of what nursing isdone that is organized into knowledge areas and modes of intervention, rather than into areas of professional service. Theories of adolescent development, for instance, can be an area of study; pediatric nursing is not. Such a focus upon areas of knowledge would naturally lead to thinking about knowns and unknowns, and researchable questions would automatically follow. Instead, faculty members too commonly think about “covering content” or “covering a unit.” This results in the teaching of half-truths. Even more
262
Nurs Outlook 60 (2012) 259e263
serious, the long-term effect is premature closure of the mind, with no questions asked. Furthermore, where the curriculum is organized in a meaningful fashion, it is easier to incorporate doctoral-prepared faculty into the teaching program. At present in many schools there is a terrible misfit between the curriculum and the research-prepared faculty. It may be difficult to develop an adequate teaching load for a bacteriologist, psychologist, or sociologist who does not possess expertise in a clinical area. This may well be a significant reason for Marella’s finding that those nurses with a Ph.D. in the natural and behavioral sciences do more research and publish more than nurses with doctorates in education and nursing. But, if the research is carried out with little influence upon the teaching content and the curriculum, those research articles may have been procured at great cost to the intellectual growth of nursing. If the curriculum were to be organized into areas of knowledge, the serious dichotomy between basic and applied research would be less. If one is studying social interaction theories, there is no serious problem, as to whether one’s research is directed toward explaining the phenomenon or to the kind of intervention necessary to alter or support the course of the behavior. In fact, researchers with these differing aims can stimulate each other. The problem is not basic science versus professional applications but rather incongruent conceptualizations. This is a problem worthy of hard thinking within our faculties.
Finding New Funding Until now, I have spoken of some possible ways to make better use of existing funds. Equally important (most deans would consider this as more important) is going after more money for research in new ways. In this regard, nurse researchers have at least three characteristics, over and above their research competence, which make them desirable participants in new re search projects. First is the researcher’s license to practice nursing; second is the fact that she represents another health profession for a multidisciplinary project; and third, the nurse researcher is usually a woman. These traits are often interrelated and can be used to the researcher’s advantage, both in procuring financial support and research participation. The nurse’s legal access to patients in health institutions is unlikely to be excelled by any group. The
physician has better access to his own patients but may have considerable difficulty in obtaining research subjects from other private physicians. Access to patients and possession of a wealth of empirical data about patient care and health institutions’ operations can make the nurse researcher a valued member of a multidisciplinary team. However, while these attributes may open doors, it is the nurse’s own research competence that will keep her on the team or enable her to get significant nursing questions included in a joint research proposal. In addition, sophisticated researchers recognize that the presence of a woman on the investigative team is a plus in grantsmanship. The health care dollar collected at university hospitals and the academic dollar collected at universities reflects income, a portion of which is ultimately assigned to the support of research. In schools of nursing we are increasingly seeking and obtaining nursing’s share of academic research funds, but I know of no school of nursing that has yet succeeded in tapping research money hidden in the health service dollar. There are some schools that should be able to develop a valid claim to such funds, and every effort should be made to secure nursing’s share of these funds. Therefore, while I believe that external support of nursing research is essential and in the best interest of a society that needs nursing care as well as medical care, I also believe that nursing as a profession and nurse educators in schools of nursing that have graduate programs can do much to support nursing research, including better use of their resources and the potentials of nurse researchers. Most important, however, nursing research must be integrated and its values institutionalized within graduate programs and not merely treated as an embellishment to the college’s other educational efforts and offerings.
references
1. American Nurses’ Association. Facts About Nursing 72-73. Kansas City: The Association. p. 10. 2. ______Summary Proceedings; AMA House of Delegates Reports 1975. Kansas City: The Association, p. 69. 3. Holley, Marie. Research Survival Problems and Stategies. Salt Lake City, College of Nursing, University of Utah, 1974. (Unpublished paper) 4. Marella, Medea. Factors Influencing the Research Actioity of Faculty in Graduate Programs in Nursing. New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1975. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation)
Nurs Outlook 60 (2012) 259e263
www.nursingoutlook.org
ANNIVERSARY ARTICLE
Nursing research and graduate education Virginia Cleland
Nursing research and its values must be internalized and institutionalized within graduate nursing programs, rather than simply added on as an embellishment.
It is true that nursing, like any other profession, faces problems brought about by external forces-problems that nursing, single-handedly, cannot solve. At the same time, though, there are problems that are within nursing’s power to solve, because these problems are brought about by forces within the profession. We have had opportunities that we have not taken advantage of as effectively as we might have and I am not convinced that we have always used our resources wiselyd especially as these relate to the research and the researchers so very much needed in nursing. For instance, we tend to attribute many of our problems to lack of financial support but, in truth, nursing has received enormous public support. Our financial and faculty resources have been used, however, (1) to produce more and more nurses without enough consideration of their potential for developing serious, long term career commitments; and (2) to prepare nurses for practice without paying sufficient attention to the level of clinical proficiency that employers are entitled to expect. The profession should have given and must now give its highest priority to graduate education and, more specifically, to the preparation of productive nurse researchers, Research is vitally needed in both the process and content of nursing and the optimal organization of nursing services, if we are to achieve quality of care and an employment environment conducive to job satisfaction for the practitioner. Otherwise, it is wasteful to enroll more and more
students in programs that are reported to articulate so poorly with the health systemda problem that in itself needs to be systematically documented. It is also futile to expend large sums of money to alleviate problems unless research has been conducted to determine sufficiently “what” should be done and “how” it can be done. Nurse researchers could study these problems as well as help to convince federal funding administrators, the nursing profession, and university faculty and administrators of the need for planned and sequential research into the: total system of nursing care. We can assume that the financial and human resources for nursing research will probably be quite limited in the present and immediate future. But such economic stringencies can force some realignments and restructuring of programs and systems that may ultimately prove to be more effective than continued support of old patterns. This, then, is an appropriate time for the profession and the faculties of graduate programs in nursing education to seek ways to achieve greater research productivity and efficiency. To this end, I would like to discuss some specific areas for consideration.
Loci of Research Ideally, the university, rather than the service agency, is the locus of choice for initiating formal research studies. Researchers in academic settings can reach out to a variety of health care institutions to conduct clinical research. However, even medicine, with its enormous human and financial resources, tends to develop second-rate research programs in health service institutions that lack close university relationships. The
Dr. Cleland received her M.N. degree from Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, after completing her B.S. at Monmouth College. She earned an M.A. degree from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. from Wayne State University, where she is professor and director of graduate studies in the College of Nursing. This paper is based on speeches given at New York University and the University of Pittsburgh in 1975. This article is reprinted with permission from Nursing Outlook. Cleland V. Nursing Research and Graduate Education. Nurs Outlook 1975; 23(10):642-5. 0029-6554/$ - see front matter Ó 1975 Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2012.06.013
260
Nurs Outlook 60 (2012) 259e263
university, on the other hand, can provide consultant help, critique of ideas by colleagues, and a valid reward systemdall of which health care institutions cannot normally supply. Most important, a research program in a university can be interwoven with an educational program to develop more researchers. In looking at the university setting, we must also consider the number of faculty prepared to teach and conduct research. In 1972, with nearly 780,000 registered nurses employed in the United States, only slightly more than 1,100 possessed earned doctorates.1 And, on the basis of data from ANA’s Council of Nurse Researchers, fewer than 25 percent of these nurses are directly involved in research activities.2 The profession, therefore, should give attention to the possibility of consolidating its nurse researchers into a limited number of university programs. In addition, schools of nursing that do not have a graduate program should not attempt to support a formal research program. Today, the attic-type of lone researcher is so rarely a success that this idea should be rejected as a possible model. If there are faculty members in such schools who do wish to conduct research, they should be urged to seek positions in universities with graduate programs, if at all possible. On the other hand, schools that have a graduate program terminating at the master’s level would be well advised to focus upon the preparation of evaluators and utilizers of research. Within a profession, a good case can be made for such a faculty to concentrate on preparing practitioners who can make appropriate use of research findings. Decreasing the lag between the time when a research hypothesis is well supported and the time when it becomes commonly utilized in professional practice can be a very valid goal in itself. While all master’s programs require research courses, the objective, whether acknowledged or not, is really to prepare the graduate to read research literature critically, to develop and defend ideas, and to stimulate thought and plans for the application of findings. Conducting small studies has value in that it enhances the nurse’s ability to understand and evaluate research, but it does not prepare a principal investigator. I know of no discipline or profession that claims to prepare investigators at the master’s level. In any of them, there is only a handful of research investigators who do not have their doctorate.
Centers of Research I would therefore urge that nursing establish centers of active researchers in university settings where there are doctoral programs of study for nurses. There is no reason why nursing should be any different from other professions and disciplines in which faculty research and the education of future researchers are concurrently developed in doctoral programs.
Many nurse researchers are frankly worried about the number of universities that are reported to be planning to initiate doctoral programs in nursing. Do we have an adequate mass of senior level faculty researchers to permit more than eight to ten such programs at this time? It will not help the progress of nursing as a profession nor the development of the science underlying nursing practice if doctorallyprepared nurses without postgraduate research experience, without clinical depth, and without university-level faculty experience are employed on widely scattered campuses, each one trying to develop a new doctoral program in nursing. I see this restriction on the number of research-doctoral education programs, however, as only a temporary limitation until such time as more doctorally-prepared nurse researchers are available.
Increasing Research Productivity Within a particular university, what can be done to facilitate the nursing faculty’s research productivity? The most important consideration, I believe, is the expectation of the dean and faculty concerning scholarly activity. In this regard many schools seems to progress through three stages. First, no research expectations at all; two, research and writing are viewed as optional activities for some faculty members; and three, research and scholarly writing are essential expectations of all faculty members. (It is my impression that each stage generally coincides with a change in deanship.) At a meeting of project directors of research development grants held at the University of Utah last spring, Marie Holley spoke on research survival and strategies and raised the following questions which can be used to clarify a school’s commitment to research: Is your school willing to reduce its undergraduate enrollment and undergraduate teaching faculty to support faculty research activities and research offering at the graduate level? Do you have recruitment and budgetary plans to increase present ratios of doctorally-prepared to master’s and baccalaureate-prepared faculty members? Is your school willing to provide time for faculty to develop individual research grants and to consider the possibility of dual appointments for faculty in research? In other words, there may be value in considering teaching-research, teaching-clinical, and clinical-research appointments as alternatives. Is the amount of faculty assistance required by graduate students engaged in research taken into consideration in planning faculty-student ratios? Are there plans to support research faculty and staff as part of the regular budget of the school, or is this already being done?
Nurs Outlook 60 (2012) 259e263
Are the numbers of clinical supervision hours for faculty reasonable for the number of credit hours obtained and are these best for student learning?3 To Dr. Holley’s list, I would add one more: “Is the school willing to relate salary increases and promotions to scholarly productivity?” A faculty personnel committee can be very helpful in working with the dean in this area. At my own institution, we are trying to view each promotion and tenure award for the purpose of assuring that the quality of the faculty will improve each year.
Needed: A Reordering of Priorities What other factors influence faculty research efforts? Marella recently studied factors that influence research activity of faculty in graduate programs in nursing.4 She found that when nursing faculty members were asked how they thought the university ranked seven faculty activities, teaching was most important, research second, and publications third. However, when these same faculty members indicated their personal rankings, teaching was viewed as most important, student advisement and counseling second, and research third. Why would student advisement and counseling rank second? Isn’t this related to nursing’s excessively high instructional costs? One can also hypothesize that this counseling and advising related to the femaleness of the occupation. Is is not likely that the long-term effect of excessive counseling will be to create dependency and curb initiative and the development of personal autonomy in students? I tend to view this excessive counseling of students and the excessive refinement of objectives as games some faculties play to avoid doing research. I have looked more than casually at the faculties of various disciplines and professions at my own university and others and have concluded that there is a nearly perfect inverse relationship between the amount of time a faculty spends in research activities and the amount of time spent writing college, program, course, unit, and class objectives. Where faculties are weak on scholarship, they tend to be strong on the writing of objectives. In some schools, at least, there is need for faculty to move beyond objectives and consider less expensive teaching strategies. Audiovisual materials, for instance, are not too commonly used at the graduate level. Yet I recently reviewed a course in research methodology where one instructor and a graduate assistant teach 150 students. Using a variety of techniques, that instructor appeared to have as effective a course and as much student involvement as at my own institution, where we teach the same course with only 15 to 25 persons per section.
261
Similarly, if the teacher uses a tape recorder to record her comments when correcting papers and allows the student to respond to the taped comments, the student will probably receive many more suggestions than would be the case if the comments were handwritten. Such modifications of teaching methods hold considerable potential for freeing faculty time.
Organizing Research Activities Sometimes faculties have agonizing experiences trying to organize their research effort. I believe that the position of director of research is needed. With adequate assistance this position could be combined with that of the director of graduate studies. Graduate schools often combine the dean’s academic and research support roles but, just as often, they separate these positions. At Wayne State University, we have found a center for health research to be a helpful mechanism. At one time, our center operated as a department with faculty assigned to it. This did not work because the research and educational efforts of the college became too separated. Now the center provides support services to research faculty who retain membership in regular departments. By and large, researchers are strongly autonomous persons who do not wish to be organized in any bureaucratic fashion. Rather, they tend to form “clumps,” whereby a principal investigator recruits young faculty and students to work in a specific problem area. The director of our center is also director of research for the college and, as such, is the main spokesperson and defender of research where budgetary and personnel decisions are made. This mechanismdthe center has been tremendously successful in making the university’s administrative officials aware of the research effort in the college of nursing.
Knowledge Areas Instead of trying to organize research or researchers, it is far better to develop a conceptual framework for the curriculum that is derived from a philosophical belief system of what nursing isdone that is organized into knowledge areas and modes of intervention, rather than into areas of professional service. Theories of adolescent development, for instance, can be an area of study; pediatric nursing is not. Such a focus upon areas of knowledge would naturally lead to thinking about knowns and unknowns, and researchable questions would automatically follow. Instead, faculty members too commonly think about “covering content” or “covering a unit.” This results in the teaching of half-truths. Even more
262
Nurs Outlook 60 (2012) 259e263
serious, the long-term effect is premature closure of the mind, with no questions asked. Furthermore, where the curriculum is organized in a meaningful fashion, it is easier to incorporate doctoral-prepared faculty into the teaching program. At present in many schools there is a terrible misfit between the curriculum and the research-prepared faculty. It may be difficult to develop an adequate teaching load for a bacteriologist, psychologist, or sociologist who does not possess expertise in a clinical area. This may well be a significant reason for Marella’s finding that those nurses with a Ph.D. in the natural and behavioral sciences do more research and publish more than nurses with doctorates in education and nursing. But, if the research is carried out with little influence upon the teaching content and the curriculum, those research articles may have been procured at great cost to the intellectual growth of nursing. If the curriculum were to be organized into areas of knowledge, the serious dichotomy between basic and applied research would be less. If one is studying social interaction theories, there is no serious problem, as to whether one’s research is directed toward explaining the phenomenon or to the kind of intervention necessary to alter or support the course of the behavior. In fact, researchers with these differing aims can stimulate each other. The problem is not basic science versus professional applications but rather incongruent conceptualizations. This is a problem worthy of hard thinking within our faculties.
Finding New Funding Until now, I have spoken of some possible ways to make better use of existing funds. Equally important (most deans would consider this as more important) is going after more money for research in new ways. In this regard, nurse researchers have at least three characteristics, over and above their research competence, which make them desirable participants in new re search projects. First is the researcher’s license to practice nursing; second is the fact that she represents another health profession for a multidisciplinary project; and third, the nurse researcher is usually a woman. These traits are often interrelated and can be used to the researcher’s advantage, both in procuring financial support and research participation. The nurse’s legal access to patients in health institutions is unlikely to be excelled by any group. The
physician has better access to his own patients but may have considerable difficulty in obtaining research subjects from other private physicians. Access to patients and possession of a wealth of empirical data about patient care and health institutions’ operations can make the nurse researcher a valued member of a multidisciplinary team. However, while these attributes may open doors, it is the nurse’s own research competence that will keep her on the team or enable her to get significant nursing questions included in a joint research proposal. In addition, sophisticated researchers recognize that the presence of a woman on the investigative team is a plus in grantsmanship. The health care dollar collected at university hospitals and the academic dollar collected at universities reflects income, a portion of which is ultimately assigned to the support of research. In schools of nursing we are increasingly seeking and obtaining nursing’s share of academic research funds, but I know of no school of nursing that has yet succeeded in tapping research money hidden in the health service dollar. There are some schools that should be able to develop a valid claim to such funds, and every effort should be made to secure nursing’s share of these funds. Therefore, while I believe that external support of nursing research is essential and in the best interest of a society that needs nursing care as well as medical care, I also believe that nursing as a profession and nurse educators in schools of nursing that have graduate programs can do much to support nursing research, including better use of their resources and the potentials of nurse researchers. Most important, however, nursing research must be integrated and its values institutionalized within graduate programs and not merely treated as an embellishment to the college’s other educational efforts and offerings.
references
1. American Nurses’ Association. Facts About Nursing 72-73. Kansas City: The Association. p. 10. 2. ______Summary Proceedings; AMA House of Delegates Reports 1975. Kansas City: The Association, p. 69. 3. Holley, Marie. Research Survival Problems and Stategies. Salt Lake City, College of Nursing, University of Utah, 1974. (Unpublished paper) 4. Marella, Medea. Factors Influencing the Research Actioity of Faculty in Graduate Programs in Nursing. New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1975. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation)