A study of nurse managers' constructs of nurse researchers

Recent fundamental changes in health care policy and provision have emphasized the need for a research culture within the National Health Service (NHS). The argument underpinning this revolves around the assumption that increasing the evidence-base of practice may have a significant impact on the quality of patient care. In consequence, members of the paramedical professions have been urged to become more research aware and research active. Despite these exhortations, however, there is mounting concern generally within the professions allied to medicine and, within nursing in particular, that the corpus of essential research evidence is not sufficient and that which exists is only partially effective in informing practice. While numerous explanations have been put forward to account for this, it is conceivable that the way in which the nurse's role is construed both by the nurse and by associated personnel is dysfunctional to the development of the nurse as researcher. To test this hypothesis, two groups of nurse managers were asked to consider how much of each of 15 bipolar dimensions was possessed by a nurse described either as 'a good clinician' or as 'a good researcher'. The results suggested that a nurse described as a good researcher was attributed with fewer of the characteristics assumed to be inherent to a good nurse. In this way, to be a good researcher appears to be fundamentally incompatible with being a good nurse. Moreover, a good researcher was also less likely to be employed. These results implicate the role of traditional attributions of nursing and are discussed in the context of the development of nursing research.