Language and nursing research

The intent of this chapter can be summarized by borrowing Paterson's (1978) words: For responsible, effective existence the professional requires language [emphasis added] to relate authentically the purposes, beliefs, concerns, and events experienced continually in the nursing world. (p. 51). The noumenal exists in those phenomena listed by practicing nurses, but each seems to be a thing in itself--something waiting for description to bring it into our everyday awareness and to give it significance. It is as though we need to assert these events as nursing's, articulate our authentic experience with patients, claim what we believe is paramount to health (i.e., good nursing), and conceptualize what is uniquely the abstract and the concrete, the enduring and the relevant meanings of shared human experience between patient and nurse. We believe that qualitative research methods have much to offer as a research paradigm that is congruent with nursing's larger worldview, paradigm, or model. We close this chapter with Table 1-9, an illustration of the language of the qualitative research methods, and leave our readers to draw their own conclusions.