Back to the future: building on the past

All researchers must acknowledge the accomplishments of the past, build on previous research and theory, and provide clinicians with guidance about what knowledge is ready to be applied in practice with children and families. One of the ways in which research in parent-child nursing will advance is for our research to be well designed and well implemented. The quality and contribution of the research is determined only after all aspects of the design and implementation have been considered, with no single aspect being considered more important than any other. It is agreed that parent-child nurse researchers must move beyond the presentation and even publication of small discrete studies to a more integrated model in which one focuses on synthesis and aggregation of knowledge from a variety of sources (Broome, 1993; Cronenwett, 1993). One of the ways this can be avoided is for researchers to develop programs of research rather than the common pattern of jumping from one topic to another. Then, even if a researcher's studies are based on "small" samples, over the series of studies comprising their research program, their data might be able to be integrated into a larger, more dramatic data set or projection of findings.