Fundamentals of Qualitative Phenomenological Nursing Research

Brigitte S. Cypress

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119780090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nursing

Fundamentals of Qualitative Phenomenological Nursing Research is the first book of its kind to specifically link the findings of qualitative research to evidence-based practice, policy, theory, and theory development. Designed for novice researchers, graduate students, and experienced practitioners alike, this comprehensive resource provides up-to-date coverage of research methods and techniques, the use of data analysis software, phenomenological writing and publishing, and more.

The text opens with a general introduction to qualitative research and its components, followed by detailed description of the philosophical, paradigmatic, and conceptual aspects of phenomenological inquiry. Subsequent sections address topics including the practical aspects of phenomenological investigations, the concepts of rigor and validity in qualitative studies, and the methods of phenomenological data, collection, reduction, analysis, interpretation, and presentation. Throughout the book, author Brigitte S. Cypress offers expert guidance and real-world tips regarding the challenges researchers encounter when conducting a qualitative study.

• Provides simple, straightforward descriptions of qualitative research methods with actual phenomenological examples
• Features numerous in-depth exemplars of the philosophical and paradigmatic aspects of qualitative research from the author's own studies
• Includes practical advice on teamwork, mentoring relationships, data organization, and reporting phenomenological studies
• Presents approaches for dealing with ethical issues, methods for collecting, recording, and storing data, and techniques for analyzing and interpreting findings
• Examines the role of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software

Fundamentals of Qualitative Phenomenological Nursing Research is a must-have guide for qualitative researchers from any discipline, academics and faculty members, and undergraduate and graduate nursing students wanting to learn more about phenomenology as a research approach.

I
Framing Qualitative Phenomenological Research

• Chapter 1: The “What,” “Why,” “Who,” and “How” of Qualitative Research: A Snapshot
• Chapter 2: Exploring the Philosophical, Paradigmatic, and Conceptual Underpinnings of Qualitative Phenomenological Research

1
The “What,” “Why,” “Who,” and “How” of Qualitative Research: A Snapshot

Qualitative research methods began to appear in nursing in the 1960s and 1970s, to cautious and reluctant acceptance. In the 1980s, qualitative health research emerged as a distinctive domain and mode of inquiry (Sandelowski 2003). “Qualitative research” refers to any kind of research that produces findings not arrived at by means of statistical analysis or other means of quantification (Borbasi and Jackson 2012; Strauss and Corbin 1990). It uses a naturalistic approach that seeks to understand phenomena related to persons' lives, stories, and behaviors, including those related to health, organizational functioning, social movements, and interactional relationships. It is underpinned by several theoretical perspectives, namely constructivist‐interpretive, critical, post‐positivist, post‐structural/post‐modern, and feminist (Ingham‐Broomfield 2015). One conducts a qualitative study to uncover the nature of a person's experiences with a phenomenon in context‐specific conditions such as illness (acute and chronic), addiction, loss, disability, and end‐of‐life (EOL ). Qualitative research is used to explore, uncover, describe, and understand what lies behind a given phenomenon, about which little may be known. This deeper understanding can only be attained through a qualitative inquiry, and not through mere numbers or statistical models. Qualitative inquiry represents a legitimate mode of social and human science exploration, without apology and without comparison to quantitative research (Creswell 2007).

1.1 Why Do Qualitative Research?

The tradition of using qualitative methods to study human phenomena is grounded in the social sciences (Streubert and Carpenter 1999). This methodological revolution has made way for a more interpretative approach, because aspects of human values, culture, and relationships are not described fully using quantitative research methods. Unlike quantitative researchers, who seek causal determination, prediction, and generalization of findings, qualitative researchers allow the phenomenon of interest to unfold naturally (Patton 2014), striving to explore, describe, understand, and delve into a colorful, deep, contextual world of interpretations (Golafshani 2001). Thus, the practice of qualitative research has expanded to clinical settings because empirical approaches have proven to be inadequate in answering questions related to human subjectivity where interpretation is involved (Thorne 1997). Consequently, qualitative health research is a research approach to exploring health and illness as they are perceived by the individual, rather than from the researcher's perspective (Morse 2012). Morse (2012) states that “Researchers use qualitative research methods to illicit emotions and perspectives, beliefs, and values, actions, and behaviors, and to understand the participant's responses to health and illness, and the meanings they construct about the experience” (p. 21). Qualitative research provides a rich inductive description that necessitates interpretation. It also calls for more holistic evidence to inform health policy decision‐making, shining a spotlight on the synthesis of qualitative evidence (Carroll 2017; Lewin et al. 2018; Majid and Vanstone 2018). Researchers in the healthcare arena, practitioners, and policy‐makers are increasingly pressed to translate these qualitative findings for practice, put them to use, and evaluate their utility in effecting desired change, with the goal of improving public health and reducing disparities in healthcare delivery (Sandelowski 2003).

Morse (2012) asserts that there are other reasons for conducting a qualitative inquiry. Other writers believe that the role of qualitative inquiry is to provide hypotheses and research questions based on the findings of qualitative studies. Qualitative research can serve as a foundation from which to develop surveys and questionnaires, thus producing models for quantitative testing. But what is really the most important function of qualitative inquiry? According to Morse (2012), it is the moral imperative of qualitative inquiry to humanize health care. She states: “The social justice agenda of qualitative health research is one that humanizes health care” (p. 52). So, what is humanizing health care? Morse (2012) articulates: “Humanizing encompasses a perspective on attitudes, beliefs, expectations, practices, and behaviors that influence the quality of care, administration of that care, conditions judged to warrant (or not warrant) empathetic care, responses to care, and therapeutics, and anticipated and actual outcomes of patient or community care” (pp. 54–55).

Conducting research should be sort of a social justice project. Denzin (2010) recognizes making social justice a public agenda within qualitative inquiry. He emphasizes that qualitative inquiry can contribute to social justice through: (i) identifying different definitions of a problem and/or situation that is being evaluated with some agreement that change is required; (ii) locating the assumptions held by policy‐makers, clients, welfare workers, online professionals, and other interested parties and showing them to be correct or incorrect; (iii) identifying the strategic points of interventions and thus enabling them to be evaluated and improved; (iv) suggesting alternative moral points of view from which the problem, the policy, and the program can be interpreted and assessed; and (v) exposing the limits of statistics and statistical evaluations using the more qualitative materials furnished by this approach (pp. 24–25).

1.2 Who Does Qualitative Research?

Qualitative research is done by researchers in the social sciences, as well as by practitioners in fields that concern themselves with issues related to human behavior and functioning. These are health professionals who are able to identify a research question and recognize the particular context and situation that will achieve the best answers to it. According to Morse (2012), the qualitative health researcher should be an expert methodologist who has an understanding of illness, the patient's condition, and staff roles and relationships, and who can balance the clinical situation from different perspectives (p. 23). A qualitative researcher also requires theoretical and social sensibility, interactional skills, the ability to maintain analytical distance while drawing upon past experience, and theoretical knowledge to interpret what they observe.

1.3 What Are the Characteristics of Qualitative Research?

Creswell (2012) discusses how qualitative research studies today involve closer attention to the interpretive nature of inquiry, and situation within the political, social, and cultural context of the researchers, participants, and readers. He presents several characteristics of qualitative research, as follows: (i) natural setting: data are collected face‐to‐face in the field at the site where participants experience the phenomenon under study; the inquiry should also be conducted in a way that does not disturb the natural context of the phenomenon; (ii) researcher as key instrument: the researchers collect the data themselves rather than relying on instruments developed by others; (iii) multiple sources of data: the researchers gather multiple forms of data, including interviews, observations, and document examination, rather than rely on a single source; (iv) inductive data analysis: data are organized into abstract units of information (“bottom‐up” or moving from specific to general), working back and forth between the themes and the database until a comprehensive set of themes is established, and ending up with general conclusions or theories; (v) participant's meanings: the researchers keep a focus on learning the meaning that the participants hold about the phenomenon, and not the meaning that they bring to the study themselves; (vi) emergent design: the initial plan for the study cannot be tightly prescribed, but must be emergent; all phases of the process may change or shift after the researchers enter the field and begin to collect data; (vii) theoretical lens: use of a “lens” to view the st...