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Biomedical subjects

M Sandelowski

Publications and source records attributed to M Sandelowski.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Real qualitative researchers do not count: the use of numbers in qualitative research.

Two myths about qualitative research are that real qualitative researchers do not count and cannot count. These antinumber myths have led to the underutilization of numbers in qualitative research and to the simplistic view of qualitative research as non- or antinumber. Yet numbers are integral to qualitative research, as meaning depends, in part, on number. As in quantitative research, numbers are used in qualitative research to establish the significance of a research project, to document what is known about a problem, and to describe a sample. But they are also useful for showcasing the labor and complexity of qualitative work and to generate meaning from qualitative data; to document, verify, and test researcher interpretations or conclusions; and to re-present target events and experiences. Although numbers are important in the treatment of qualitative data, qualitative researchers should avoid the counting pitfalls of verbal counting, overcounting, misleading counting, and acontextual counting.

Abortion, Induced↗
PubMed2001

Technology and humane nursing care: (ir)reconcilable or invented difference?

UNLABELLED: AIM(S) OF THE PAPER: This paper questions the validity of a boundary presumed to exist between technology and humane care. It argues the need for reconciliation of presumed tension(s) between technology and person focused care and the need to reconsider our ways of understanding the relations between technology and nursing. BACKGROUND/RATIONALE: Recent scholarship in the social sciences related to reproductive and imaging technologies and emergency resuscitation are examined and arguments are presented that question the appropriateness of a humanist view that emphasizes technology on the nonhuman and nonnatural side of a human/nonhuman, nature/artifice divide. It is argued that what determines experiences such as dehumanization is not technology per se but how individual technologies are used and operate in specific user contexts, the meanings that are attributed to them, how individuals or cultural groups define what is human, and the organizational, human, political and economic technological system (technique) that creates rationale and efficient order within nursing, health care and society. CONCLUSION: The paper concludes by asking whether the commonplace appeal to resolve tensions between humane care and technology has erroneously highlighted technology as the reason for impersonal care, and encourages re-examination of the relationship(s) between technology, humane care and nursing practice.

Conflict, Psychological↗
PubMed2001

In the field with the Beck depression inventory.

Qualitative methods are typically and formally used only in the earliest phases of instrument development to generate items. Once these items are generated, instrument development usually then moves into the testing phases, where quantitative methods prevail. The achievement of psychometric credibility is presumed to depend largely on quantitative measures of reliability and validity. Or if qualitative methods are employed, their use is masked, unfocused, and/or unplanned. The planned use of qualitative methods is critical in every phase of instrument use and in all studies that depend for their results on instruments, and their use is critical in illuminating problems with existing instruments. The authors illustrate these points by drawing on the first author's experiences in the field with the Beck Depression Inventory in her research program on managing fatigue in persons with HIV/AIDS.

Depression↗
PubMed2000

Combining qualitative and quantitative sampling, data collection, and analysis techniques in mixed-method studies.

Researchers have increasingly turned to mixed-method techniques to expand the scope and improve the analytic power of their studies. Yet there is still relatively little direction on and much confusion about how to combine qualitative and quantitative techniques. These techniques are neither paradigm- nor method-linked; researchers' orientations to inquiry and their methodological commitments will influence how they use them. Examples of sampling combinations include criterion sampling from instrument scores, random purposeful sampling, and stratified purposeful sampling. Examples of data collection combinations include the use of instruments for fuller qualitative description, for validation, as guides for purposeful sampling, and as elicitation devices in interviews. Examples of data analysis combinations include interpretively linking qualitative and quantitative data sets and the transformation processes of qualitizing and quantitizing.

Data Collection↗
PubMed2000

Whatever happened to qualitative description?

The general view of descriptive research as a lower level form of inquiry has influenced some researchers conducting qualitative research to claim methods they are really not using and not to claim the method they are using: namely, qualitative description. Qualitative descriptive studies have as their goal a comprehensive summary of events in the everyday terms of those events. Researchers conducting qualitative descriptive studies stay close to their data and to the surface of words and events. Qualitative descriptive designs typically are an eclectic but reasonable combination of sampling, and data collection, analysis, and re-presentation techniques. Qualitative descriptive study is the method of choice when straight descriptions of phenomena are desired.

Data Collection↗
PubMed1999

Time and qualitative research.

Qualitative researchers may bear a special obligation in relation to time, as the context they hope to preserve for the phenomena they study is, in large part, temporal. Temporal concerns are integral to qualitative research, whether the focus is on disciplines in which largely qualitative methods are used, paradigms of inquiry that are primarily associated with qualitative methods, or on qualitative methods themselves. Temporal factors play a critical role in purposive sampling, the content and structure of data collection and analysis techniques, and in the re-presentation of data in the qualitative research report. Qualitative research designs may be oriented to synchronic and/or diachronic analyses. The Trajectory Model is a useful framework for sampling, data collection, and analysis. The Storyline Graph is a tool especially useful in narrative research.

Data Collection↗
PubMed1999

Interviewing children.

The focus in health-related research on children has shifted from seeking information about children to seeking information directly from them. Children, even as young as three years old, can give graphic descriptions and have excellent recall of experiences related to adverse events, such as illness and hospitalization. Children use scripts as the primary means of anticipating, comprehending, and re-creating real-life experience. The content, timing, number, and structure of interviews will influence the completeness, accuracy, and consistency of children's recall of events. Although at times conflicting, the findings from recent scholarship on children's narrative competence will assist researchers to select the interviewing strategies most likely to yield faithful representations of experience.

Child, Hospitalized↗
PubMed1999

Culture, conceptive technology, and nursing.

Technology is a form of cultural expression, formed of and forming culture. A paradox about technological innovation is that, in addition to creating new human arrangements and possibilities, it often serves only to reinforce existing sociocultural practices, norms, and values. The technologically radical is often the culturally conservative. Conceptive technology has contributed toward the redefinition of patienthood, the multiplication of models of infertility, and the reinforcement of existing cultural norms. Nurses are well-positioned to conduct a kind of technology assessment that places culture and ethics at the center of inquiry. They are also well-positioned to assist women and their partners seeking technological assistance to reproduce to understand the controversies concerning conceptive technology that may account for their own ambivalence toward continuing or terminating medical treatment, societal ambivalence toward supporting expensive fertility treatments, and cultural ambivalence toward technological development.

Culture↗
PubMed1999

Early parental interactions with and perceptions of multiple birth infants.

The perceptions and interactions of mothers and fathers of seven sets of twins and one set of triplets were compared to those of parents of 49 singleton infants. Couples were typically interviewed together three times during the pregnancy and at 1 week and 3 months post-partum. Two-weekly observations of mother-father-infant interactions were conducted after the first postnatal interview. Three major themes were apparent in the interviews--the positive and negative specialness for multiple births, difficulties involved in managing more than one infant, and attachment issues--that were also evident during the observations. Although there were few differences in care-giving and interactive behaviours between the multiple birth and singleton parents, the logistics of caring for more than one infant dictated that multiple birth infants were left alone more and looked at, talked to and held less often. Couples used different strategies to care for their infants, varying in both the extent to which they interacted preferentially with the infants and in the relative involvement of the mother, father and others.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1999

The good, the bad and the relative, Part Two: Goodness and the criterion problem in qualitative research.

This (part two) paper finds 'the problem of the criterion' at the heart of disputes about what constitutes goodness in qualitative research, an ancient philosophic conundrum as to how best represent reality. Ways around the problem are considered, including conceiving criteria as open-ended 'lists', and 'enabling conditions'. Discussion principally concerns the impact of postmodernist thinking on the topic, and how qualitative researchers might usefully juxtapose the rationality of a modern world (in which notions such as reliability and validity are prized) with a mounting postmodern sensibility that acknowledges irrationality, fragmentation, and uncertainty. Part one of the paper traced efforts to define 'goodness' in qualitative research within various fields, including nursing. Disputes were found to centre on how the traditional concepts of reliability and validity related to qualitative research. In reviewing various sets of criteria of goodness, these concepts were consequently conceived as being championed, translated, exiled, redeemed, and surpassed.

Humans↗
PubMed1999

Troubling distinctions: a semiotics of the nursing/technology relationship.

I consider the discursive practices that have served conceptually and ontologically to trouble the boundaries between nursing and technology: between nurse/human/subject and machine/non-human/object. Nursing and technology have been semiotically related largely by two processes: (a) by the metaphor that depicts nursing as technology and (b) by opposition, or as not like and even in conflict with technology. Less frequently but no less significantly, nursing and technology have been semiotically linked (c) by the metaphor that depicts technology as nursing and (d) by metonymy, or by word or picture juxtapositions of nursing with technology. The troubling distinctions between nursing and technology suggest yet another reason why the construction of difference continues to elude nursing.

Humans↗
PubMed1999

Venous envy: the post-World War II debate over IV nursing.

After World War II, a debate ensued over whether nurses should perform intravenous (IV) therapy. The debate was resolved by permitting nurses to do venipunctures as physicians' agents and by recirculating the familiar tautology: if nurses were already doing venipunctures, they must be simple enough for nurses to do. The vein was a portal of entry for nurses, but one with limited access. What was ultimately ceded to nurses was not full jurisdiction over a domain of nursing practice, but rather a limited settlement in a domain of medical practice. The debate over IV therapy demonstrated how technology, in combination with ideology, can both create and destroy nursing jurisdictions.

Female↗
PubMed1998

Writing a good read: strategies for re-presenting qualitative data.

One key element in the successful dissemination and utilization of qualitative findings is the well-written research report. In contrast to quantitative research, there is no one style for reporting the findings from qualitative research. Qualitative researchers must select from an array of representational styles and formats those that best fit their research purposes, methods, and data. Qualitative researchers must attend to the balance among description, analysis, and interpretation, choose whether to emphasize character, setting, or plot, determine whose perspectives or voices will prevail, and treat metaphors seriously. Strategies for re-presenting qualitative data include using time, theme, sensitizing concepts, and coding families.

Humans↗
PubMed1998

The call to experts in qualitative research.

There are many researchers engaged in qualitative research who look to experts in this mode of inquiry to validate their findings. But can any outsider, even an "expert" in qualitative research, do this? Such an expert is unlikely to know the data as well or to be as fully immersed in the project as the researcher. There are different kinds of expertise that may be required for different phases and purposes of research, and to satisfy different epistemological and ethical concerns. Moreover, new modes of participatory research have complicated the role of expert and the idea of expertise. Researchers must be judicious in their claims to expert validation, and experts must move researchers away from a preoccupation with validation toward craftsmanship and accountability to diverse communities.

Humans↗
PubMed1998

Infertility and early parent-infant interactions.

Approximately 50% of infertile couples will become parents through pregnancy or adoption, but they experience major difficulties while working towards this goal. Infertility treatments are associated with physical pain and psychological distress, and adoption procedures are prolonged and emotionally stressful. The extent to which these stressors alter the parenting of these couples is not known. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to examine the early parent-infant interactions in infertile couples who become parents through pregnancy or adoption. Two groups of infertile couples (30 who achieved pregnancy and 21 who adopted) and a group of 19 couples without fertility problems were observed interacting with their infants twice, 7 to 21 days after the infant's arrival and a week later, at a time when both parents were at home. Their babies were between 9 days and 5 months of age. Behaviours of the mother, father and infant were recorded every 10 seconds, beginning when the baby was picked up and ending when the baby was put down asleep or 1 1/2 hours had passed. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to compare the three groups over the observations. There were no differences between fertile and infertile biological parents. Adopted infants showed more alertness, less sleeping, more smiles, and more looking than biological infants. Adoptive mothers spent less time as the sole interactor. Adoptive parents spent more time in playing with their infants and held and touched them less than did biological parents. Infertility, therefore, does not appear to affect early parenting. In general, the amounts of behaviours exhibited by infertile biological parents were very close to those of fertile parents. Differences in the behaviours of adoptive as compared to biological parents can best be explained as responses to the behaviours of their older infants, rather than as evidence of different parenting styles.

Adoption↗