Part 9 (1/2)

Frequently persons express appreciation for the meaning these events have had for them through the years. They remember the pleasure, anger, pain, fear, and/or joy they experienced.

It is not loose performance that allows raw data to convey its message to a nurse. New data are sucked easily and immediately into old, worn out, known theoretical frames and networks of words. Severe self-discipline enters into describing nursing experience with the vigor of how it was lived. Too easily the description is let fall to mediocre common forms. Proper grammar and plain English should suffice. This would carry the nursing message, as jargon borrowed from other disciplines in which the nurse always speaks as an alien, never will.

Humanistic nursing practice theory in asking for description does not ask one to forget or deny known terms and knowledge. Rather it asks for a bracketing or holding of this knowledge to the side. The nursing experience should be given an opportunity to be seen in its pure form, rather than forcing it to conform to foreign prestigious terms borrowed from other areas of specialization, which beg the meaning of the nursing event. Prior to dispersion, of course, one should weigh one's expression in English against one's expression in one's known foreign jargon. Then one will be open to choose how one wants to express and share the meaning of her nursing world.

Phenomenology accepts categorization as a necessity of communicating. It holds, nevertheless, that this is secondary to initial aware experiencing. This study method acknowledges the unfathomable complexity of existing and knowing. It strives for as adequate conceptualization of the existential experience as possible. It honors the knowing person's continued capacity for surprise and wonderment. Phenomenology asks us to go beyond the common labels to the surprise of our own and other's unique existences-in-the-world. A nurse who had been struggling over many months with a family in their home, on the day she first experienced an ”I-Thou” relations.h.i.+p with them said, ”It was as if I had gone beyond the uncooperativeness and dirtiness of the situation.”

Immediacy in labeling offers us the complacency and security of a wrapped up problem. How could a nurse be held responsible for what happened to a ”dirty,” ”uncooperative” family. The many commonly heard labels humans attribute inhumanely to others rarely relate to answers in situations or to the dreadful human suffering problems generate.

Phenomenology seeks attestation of the meaning of a situation to a partic.i.p.ant. Positivism seeks general objective categories within the universal. Phenomenology prizes differences, variations, and struggles for their representation as parts of the whole. Rather than emphasize the majority as holding sway, it recognizes that the unique contribution can possibly be the weightiest in meaning. {63}

THE PROCESS: BECOMING A FREE RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH NURSE

For a nurse to become a free responsible research nurse in the health arena she accepts her lived nursing world as beyond the controls valued in positivistic science. She appreciates her lived nursing world as saturated with knowledge to be extracted or wrung. Then she must examine, recognize, appreciate, and unfold her history, her angular view, and her human nurse potential. In prizing her view, as nurse, she will ask relevant nursing questions. To attain her potential as nurse she will discipline herself rigorously for authenticity with the self.

With the self-acceptance that comes with self-authenticity she will know the importance of the difference she and the nursing profession make and can make in the community of man. Then out of her own human social need and for the survival of nursing she will describe to propel knowledge, nursing theory, and practice forward. In this process and in its effects she will become more human as she contributes to man's humanization.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Martin Buber, _Between Man and Man_, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 93.

[2] Carl G. Jung, _Modern Man in Search of a Soul_, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1933), p. 169.

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6

THE LOGIC OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY

PERSPECTIVE: ANGULAR VIEW

In humanistic nursing practice theory we, Dr. Zderad and myself, propose that nursing practice when studied, like any other area studied, will only become available for human conceptualization if the study methods are appropriate to its nature. Therefore, the methodology presented in this chapter is relevant to humanistic nursing practice theory.

Embraced within this chapter is a methodology for studying nursing that evolved out of the process of my nursing practice. The logic of this method and of my process of nursing are one. It is not a method of another discipline superimposed on nursing. So this method did not force nursing or change nursing to have it mold or conform. As this method unfolded it arose from and in accord with nursing process. This methodology came into being only after years in which various attempts were made to get positivistic methodology to answer relevant nursing questions and to develop a professional scientific theory of nursing.

The method presented here was used initially to creatively conceptualize nursing constructs in 1967-68. The data for the development of the constructs ”comfort” and ”clinical” were gathered from my clinical nursing practice and while I was deeply engrossed in existential readings. The process or method used was not conceptualized until it was called for while writing my doctoral dissertation in 1968. It had then been used to study the clinical literary works of two psychiatric mental health nurses, Theresa G. Muller and Ruth Gilbert.[1] Its conceptualization at that time was rudimentary. Gradually it has been further conceptualized. ”From a Philosophy of Nursing to a Method of {66} Nursology,” an article published in _Nursing Research_ in 1972, was my next attempt.[2] Graduate nursing students studied this article and repeated the process of the methodology in their studies of their clinical nursing data. Reflecting on this article and realizing how others had to study and struggle with it. I became aware that still only the bare bones of my thinking were presented. Further elaboration of this methodology was called forth to share it with the _humanistic nursing practice theory_ course partic.i.p.ants. Since 1970 I have delved into phenomenologists' writings and at this time can say that this process of studying nursing is a phenomenological method of nursology.

Interesting to me is that the initiation of this method came when I first began to read the existentialist literature. Existentialism can be viewed as the fruits of phenomenological study. The process of this method has become clearer and clearer to me over time. Phenomenologically the process or method has grown out of the reality of the ”thing itself”

to be studied, in this case, clinical nursing practice.

This chapter then is the result of reflecting on these past efforts and is a conceptualization of this method as I understand it now.

The following quote is offered to support and validate the efforts put into conceptualizing this method. The philosopher of science Abraham Kaplan says of methodology:

”The aim of methodology ... is to invite speculation from science and practicality from philosophy ... to help us understand in the broadest possible terms, not the products of scientific inquiry, but the process itself.”[3]

The above quotation expresses the spirit in which this presentation is offered. Positivistic science aims at objectivity and its results are viewed as scientific facts. Nursing practice has been understood by many as an implementation of such theoretical facts. Considering my and other nurses' implementation of such facts it is apparent that in these endeavors nurses come to know much about human existence.

Philosophy is often viewed as man's contemplations, autobiographical revelations, and the values and belief systems that underlie man's actions, Can an explicit philosophy of nursing allow for more meaningful quality practice, be a resource for nurses, improve service, be available for reexamination, correction, and the forwarding of knowledge? If nursing practice is viewed as the implementation of scientific facts and what they call forth in the nursing situation related to man's condition of existence, is a heuristic science of nursing developed from this situation, by nurses, an appropriate practical professional aim?

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