Part 2
METHODOLOGY—A PROCESS OF BEING {50} {51}
5
TOWARD A RESPONSIBLE FREE RESEARCH NURSE IN THE HEALTH ARENA
ANGULAR VIEW
Research is an inherent component of humanistic nursing. What condition of humanness is necessary in the nurse for the actualization of nursing's research potential? This chapter will attempt to share some brooding and mulling on this problem.
Nurses practice within ever-moving, changing settings where formulated plans frequently and suddenly go awry. Unexpected patient needs arise. Powerful others make both reasonable and unreasonable demands. Depended on others fail us due to human frailty or lack of dependability. The nurse's setting, her researchable area, is the extreme opposite of her colleague's, the laboratory investigator's. Her area is beyond research control measures. Too, it lacks the quiet isolated atmosphere conducive to contemplation and creative thinking associated with research.
Conversely, it is oversaturated with the "stuff" of meaningful existence. It can stimulate questions to the frenzy of immobilization. The human nurse's system can become overloaded. Such overloading reflects the humanness of the nurse; like all man she can envision possibilities beyond any human being's ability of fulfillment.
Nurses know there are events in their commonplace worlds that scream for human interpretation, understanding, and attestation. The question becomes "how." This "how" depends on more than concretes and events in the nurse's setting. This "how" depends on relevant "ifs." The meaningfulness of the nursing world will be actualized conceptually "if" this is supported by institutional economic and administrative planners, other nurses, and intradisciplinary colleagues. For knowledge available and visible to nurses in the health setting to be preserved, conceptualized for durability, it needs to be valued by the institutional health community. Still, most necessary to its duration is the appreciating of this knowledge by the nurse, herself. {52}