CLINICAL LEARNING EXPERIENCES AND PROFESSIONAL NURSE CARING: A CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF FEMALE BACCALAUREATE NURSING STUDENTS.
Contributors: Georgia State University.
Published: 1993
Number of pages: 234
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Education, Curriculum and Instruction.
Description: During the last two decades, nurse researchers have investigated caring concepts and processes within nursing. However, nursing research illuminating the processes by which caring is learned, practiced, and demonstrated by students of nursing in the undergraduate clinical nursing environment has been minimal. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to discover, describe, and analyze how baccalaureate nursing students learn professional nurse caring within the clinical context of nursing education.

A critical phenomenological approach grounded in a feminist perspective was the methodology which guided this inquiry. Using purposive sampling, participants were recruited until informational redundancy was reached. A total of 18 female undergraduate nursing students from a northwest Georgia senior college participated in the study. Participants were between the ages of 22 to 46; seventeen identified their ethnicity as Caucasian and one as African American. All participants were interviewed and asked to describe their experiences related to learning professional nurse caring in the clinical setting. Interviews were audiotaped and then transcribed; the interview transcriptions constituted the data for analysis.

Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Methodological rigor of the study was established through adherence to the five authenticity criteria as outlined by Guba and Lincoln (1989). These included fairness, as well as ontological, educative, catalytic, and tactical authenticity.

Participants' understandings of how they learned caring in the clinical setting were summarized in a constitutive pattern, learning caring, which included five themes related to learning modes. The five themes were role modeling, reversing, imagining, sensing, and constructing. In order to describe how they learned caring, all participants began by describing their understanding of caring itself. These understandings were described in another constitutive pattern, creating caring. The seven themes in this category were identified as connecting, sharing being holistic, touching, advocating, being competent, and feeling good. Participants' interactions with patients were the context for the development of their understandings of caring, and this context was described in the relational theme of caring and patient interactions.

Conclusions from this study address the experiential and contextual nature of the clinical learning of caring. Instructional strategies and further research questions are recommended based on the findings of this study.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-06, Section: B, page: 2996.

Thesis (PH.D.)--GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 1993.

School code: 0079.