Читать книгу Fundamentals of Qualitative Phenomenological Nursing Research - Brigitte S. Cypress - Страница 15

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).