Nurse Researcher

BACKGROUND: Research forms an important part of clinical practice for nurses, midwives and allied healthcare professionals (NMAHPs). However, it is known there is a lack of confidence in this community in the development and use of research skills. The 4Ps Programme is a bespoke research-training programme that focuses on four areas: place, project, person and plan. AIM: To report an evaluation of the 4Ps Programme that used a survey to record the confidence levels reported by NMAHPs...

BACKGROUND: There is increasing recognition of the need to include patients and the public in the research process. There is extensive literature about patient and public involvement (PPI) in research, but fewer articles report on PPI in doctoral research. AIM: To reflect on establishing an advisory group for a doctoral study, exploring the opportunities and challenges associated with including patients with dementia in the research process. DISCUSSION: The authors discuss the practicalities of establishing an advisory group, the challenges of being a novice researcher, long-term commitment to PPI, the overall approach to PPI and ethical considerations...

BACKGROUND: Coding for gerunds is useful in developing theory in grounded theory. However, it can be confusing for the novice researcher to recognise these words, which consider actions more abstractly. AIM: To explain how to identify, analyse and code gerunds, using the example of a constructivist grounded theory study investigating the design of operating rooms. DISCUSSION: Coding for gerunds helped to illustrate participants' actions and sequences in the example study and added depth to the researcher's understanding of certain topics...

BACKGROUND: Researchers conducting studies involving pregnant women often find recruitment challenging. The COVID-19 pandemic added further complexity to studies requiring face-to-face participation. AIM: To demonstrate how to maintain the principles of practice development (PD) when a study must switch from face-to-face to remote methods of collecting data. DISCUSSION: The number of participants in the authors' study increased when they moved from face-to-face to telephone engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic...

BACKGROUND: Co-design is a research method that seeks to engage service users in research. The approach fosters inclusivity and shared power by having researchers and research participants work together for some or all of a study. AIM: To describe the experience of co-designing a patient interview study from the perspective of an expert stoma nurse, using a case-study approach and reflexive methods. DISCUSSION: Valuing expert patients' experiences when conducting research about them enabled patients to be trained as participant researchers to co-design and undertake a patient interview study...

BACKGROUND: Quantitative researchers can use permutation tests to conduct null hypothesis significance testing without resorting to complicated distribution theory. A permutation test can reach conclusions in hypothesis testing that are the same as those of better-known tests such as the t-test but is much easier to understand and implement. AIM: To introduce and explain permutation tests using two real examples of independent and dependent t-tests and their corresponding permutation tests...

BACKGROUND: Clinical research nurses and midwives (CRN/Ms) are highly specialised registered nurses. They combine their clinical nursing expertise with research knowledge and skills to aid in the delivery of rigorous, high-quality clinical research to improve health outcomes, the research participant's experience and treatment pathways ( Beer et al 2022 ). However, there is evidence that the transition into a CRN/M role is challenging for registered nurses. AIM: To discuss the development of a competency framework for CRN/Ms...

BACKGROUND: It may be challenging for researchers to recruit enough participants to have a diverse and representative sample for their studies. Usual recruitment methods that were historically effective can be difficult to use because of high costs, time constraints and geographical limitations. Social media is a low-cost, time-saving alternative. AIM: To summarise the benefits and challenges of using social media for recruitment. DISCUSSION: This article provides an overview of social media...

BACKGROUND: Several drivers are currently leading to greater emphasis of the importance of ensuring research has impact. Nursing research aims to improve patient care, safety and well-being, so it might be assumed results with the potential to effect such changes would automatically have an impact on clinical practice. However, experience suggests this is not the case and careful attention is needed for there to be an impact. AIM: To present the example of a project commissioned to develop a health communication tool to support people with learning disabilities in accessing healthcare...

BACKGROUND: Clinical trial cohorts do not often reflect target patient populations because minority ethnic groups are underrepresented in clinical trials. AIM: To increase minority ethnic groups' opportunities to participate in clinical trials, by evaluating ethnically diverse patients' perspectives of considering participation in renal clinical research. DISCUSSION: The authors gave patients participating in at least one research study the opportunity to take part in a structured survey...

BACKGROUND: The best practice model states that the highest quality of scientific information in a discipline should be used when addressing pertinent problems. The usefulness of any measure depends on the least allowable error, which implies that best practice approaches must be used during analyses of rating scales. However, modern theories of objective measurement in advanced statistics suggest there are some shortcomings in reports of questionnaire analyses. AIM: To highlight some common problems in questionnaire data and suggest techniques of constructing objective measures during rating scale analysis...

BACKGROUND: There is increasing emphasis in the UK on developing a nurse, midwife and allied health professional (NMAHP) workforce that conducts research. Training for clinical academic careers is provided by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). However, the low number of successful applicants suggested there were barriers to achieving this. The Centre for Nursing and Midwifery Led Research (CNMR) launched a fellowship programme in 2016 to backfill two days a week of NMAHPs' time for up to a year, to give them time to make competitive applications to the NIHR...

BACKGROUND: Funders, academic publishers and governance bodies increasingly require research to involve patients and the public. This also enables nurse researchers to increase the visibility of scholarly nursing roles, which are poorly understood by the public. There are different approaches to involvement, and a wealth of guidance about how it can and should be implemented. Less is known about how it should be done in the context of a nursing PhD. AIM: To discuss the experiences of the authors' nursing research group in involving patients and the public in PhD research, reflect on the benefits to be gained from doing so, and highlight considerations for those planning to involve patients and the public in their doctoral research projects...

BACKGROUND: Developing a workforce with the skills to produce and make judicious use of evidence for policy and practice decisions requires trainers who can tailor evidence and training to policy and practice priorities. AIM: To describe how a collaborative learning model adapted a systematic review course to suit Indian nurse educators and research scholars in the conduct and use of systematic reviews. DISCUSSION: A collaborative learning team of academics and research scholars brought together expertise in nursing education in India, and evidence synthesis in India and the UK...

BACKGROUND: Ecomaps are tools used in nursing practice to assess families' social support systems. Ecomaps have been used effectively in qualitative research but little attention has been given to their use as a tool in the methodological approach of hermeneutic phenomenology. AIM: To demonstrate that the use of ecomaps is congruent with the Heideggerian philosophical foundations of hermeneutic phenomenology. DISCUSSION: This article reflects on a study in which the researchers used ecomaps to explore how parents of children with cancer are supported with decision-making about their children's care...

BACKGROUND: Free association is a core concept of the free association narrative interview method, an approach that is well-known among researchers in the UK who are interested in using psychoanalytic ideas in qualitative psycho-social research. AIM: To examine the relationship between the framing of the psychoanalytic concept of free association in the contexts of qualitative research interviewing, clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy...

BACKGROUND: Models are central to the acquisition and organisation of scientific knowledge. They can be viewed as tools for interpretive description as well as cognitive representations of an empirical phenomenon. However, discussions about how to develop models in qualitative research - particularly in the literature on thematic analysis - are sparse. AIM: To discuss an approach to scientific qualitative modelling that uses the new technique described in the first part of this article ( Gildberg and Wilson 2023 ): the Empirical Test for Thematic Analysis (ETTA)...

BACKGROUND: Gatekeepers play a crucial role in successfully recruiting participants to nurse-led qualitative research, particularly in clinical settings. AIM: To present the authors' experience of recruiting and conducting qualitative interviews during the COVID-19 pandemic with the carers of patients who have chronic haematological malignancies, and the effects that gatekeepers had on recruitment. DISCUSSION: The authors had to adapt and adjust their research plan because of difficulties in accessing their target population...

BACKGROUND: Quantitative methods and statistical analysis are essential tools in nursing research, as they support researchers testing phenomena, illustrate their findings clearly and accurately, and provide explanation or generalisation of the phenomenon being investigated. The most popular inferential statistics test is the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), as it is the test designated for comparing the means of a study's target groups to identify if they are statistically different to the others...

BACKGROUND: Appropriate costing and allocation of resources is vital to ensure that recruitment to a study is achieved on time and on target. However, there is little guidance concerning the workload associated with qualitative research. AIM: To review the planned versus actual workloads in a qualitative sub-study following elective cardiac surgery in children. DISCUSSION: Parents of children approached for a clinical trial were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview to explore their views about making decisions concerning their children's participation in the trial...