MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR

Field: Nursing (Health Sciences)

This issue of The Journal of Nursing Research includes nine original articles from 5 countries, including Taiwan, Italy, Chile, Turkey, and Singapore. Nurses are indispensable to the provision of high-quality healthcare. In this issue of The Journal of Nursing Research, three studies focus on studying clinical nurses in terms of their interpersonal conflicts, perceptions of psychological care, and religious beliefs. Chang and colleagues investigated interpersonal conflict among 201 operating room (OR) nurses from three hospitals in southern Taiwan. Of the nine targets of interpersonal conflict, “medical doctor in the OR” was ranked as the most common target of conflict. Among the five categories of conflict-management strategies, “integration” was the most adopted by OR nurses. All of these strategies were negatively related to interpersonal conflict frequency, with the exception of “domination,” which was positively correlated. Using a qualitative approach, Chen and colleagues collected data from 18 registered nurses working in an acute hospital in Singapore, aiming to understand nurses’ perceptions of and barriers to providing psychological care. Lack of time, language barriers, being task-oriented, excessive documentation requirements, lack of family involvement, and fear of complaints were reported to be significant barriers to the provision of this care. The religious beliefs of nurses may influence how they provide spiritual care to patients. Chiang and colleagues used a rigorous method to develop and test an instrument to measure the religious beliefs of Taiwanese nurses. The developed 17-item Religious Belief Scale demonstrated good convergent, discriminate, and construct validities. The above mentioned studies adopt very different approaches to highlight the perspectives of nurses, with results substantively informing healthcare administrators and educators on strategies for improving the management and quality of care. The other articles in this issue are quite diverse in terms of topic, population, and method. Two interventional studies examine respectively the effect of aerobic dancing on physical fitness in patients with schizophrenia (Cheng et al.) and a theory-based health promotion education program for obese children in Turkey (Fidanci et al.). The one phenomenological study examines the lived experiences of gynecological cancer survivors in Taiwan (Tsai et al.). One of the cross-sectional studies examines the reactions of a sample of parents in central Italy to the diagnosis of Duchenne muscular dystrophy in their children and how their reactions relate to family functions and child-behavior problems (Baiocco et al.). Another cross-sectional study explores the difficulties in making the decision to have elective surgery and associated factors in adult patients in Taiwan (Lin & Chen). Finally, a large study was conducted to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Adolescent Health Promotion Scale in a Chilean sample of early adolescents. We would like to thank all of the authors who have contributed their scientific works to The Journal of Nursing Research and all of the reviewers who have taken the time to review these works critically and provided valuable comments to improve the quality of these published papers. We hope that you enjoy reading these scientific articles and will consider submitting your research findings to The Journal of Nursing Research, a platform with an increasingly respected reputation.