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Meeting the needs of relatives in critical care; a qualitative appraisal
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Relatives of critically ill patients were able to identify their needs during the intensive care phase of hospitalization. The universal need identified as very important was the need for hope. Other important needs were concerned with receiving adequate and honest information and feeling that the hospital staff members were concerned about the patient. Although several of the needs appeared to be of great concern to relatives, all the needs were considered very important by at least one relative. The majority of needs were perceived as being met consistently. Various resources were used by the relatives to meet their needs; however, specific needs were expected to be met by physicians and nurses. Since many relatives have similar needs, the use of a group process to deal with them should be investigated. A group process allows for sharing and support among the relatives and also allows one staff member to work with several relatives. The relatives perceived the role of health care personnel to be patientcentered only. If the patient is a member of a family, then the family and staff should recognize that the health care personnel are helping relatives because it is a crucial part of total patient care. This area in providing total patient care needs to be studied carefully. The relatives of critically ill patients have important needs in this crisis period. By recognizing these needs and evaluating how they are being met, total patient care will involve the family. Such involvement is essential to the care of the critically ill patient.
The contextual grounding of the meaning of human activity and language has been largely ignored in traditional approaches to research in the social and behavioral sciences. The prevailing positivist model has led to a quest for general context-free laws and to methods in which the role of context plays no part. This is now beginning to change, especially in the fields of developmental and social psychology, and in educational research. Drawing examples from phenomenology, sociolinguistics, and ethnomethodology, alternative approaches are proposed which are more appropriate to the study of meaning in context. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Nursing research has not evolved with immunity from the qualitative–quantitative debate which has surrounded the behavioural and social sciences. The outcome of this debate should be better nursing science since researchers are forced to face and address the controversial issues. Attaining this goal requires researchers to debate the issues with a knowledge of epistemology and methodology and not blind devotion to the tradition of the hard sciences. This paper addresses the issues of epistemology, methodology, and ethics for two prototypes of the qualitative–quantitative continuum. Grounded theory explains the issues of qualitative research: the search for meaning, the inclusion of environmental factors, the depth of data, and the treatment of participants as subjects. The true experiment, the epitomy of the quantitative approach, seeks to identify existing truths by isolating the significant variables and controlling for contaminating factors. Based on these arguments, recommendations are made for nursing research which rely on both approaches.