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Biomedical subjects

M Sandelowski

Publications and source records attributed to M Sandelowski.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Time and qualitative research.

Qualitative researchers may bear a special obligation in relation to time, as the context they hope to preserve for the phenomena they study is, in large part, temporal. Temporal concerns are integral to qualitative research, whether the focus is on disciplines in which largely qualitative methods are used, paradigms of inquiry that are primarily associated with qualitative methods, or on qualitative methods themselves. Temporal factors play a critical role in purposive sampling, the content and structure of data collection and analysis techniques, and in the re-presentation of data in the qualitative research report. Qualitative research designs may be oriented to synchronic and/or diachronic analyses. The Trajectory Model is a useful framework for sampling, data collection, and analysis. The Storyline Graph is a tool especially useful in narrative research.

Data Collection↗
PubMed1998

Writing a good read: strategies for re-presenting qualitative data.

One key element in the successful dissemination and utilization of qualitative findings is the well-written research report. In contrast to quantitative research, there is no one style for reporting the findings from qualitative research. Qualitative researchers must select from an array of representational styles and formats those that best fit their research purposes, methods, and data. Qualitative researchers must attend to the balance among description, analysis, and interpretation, choose whether to emphasize character, setting, or plot, determine whose perspectives or voices will prevail, and treat metaphors seriously. Strategies for re-presenting qualitative data include using time, theme, sensitizing concepts, and coding families.

Humans↗
PubMed1998

The call to experts in qualitative research.

There are many researchers engaged in qualitative research who look to experts in this mode of inquiry to validate their findings. But can any outsider, even an "expert" in qualitative research, do this? Such an expert is unlikely to know the data as well or to be as fully immersed in the project as the researcher. There are different kinds of expertise that may be required for different phases and purposes of research, and to satisfy different epistemological and ethical concerns. Moreover, new modes of participatory research have complicated the role of expert and the idea of expertise. Researchers must be judicious in their claims to expert validation, and experts must move researchers away from a preoccupation with validation toward craftsmanship and accountability to diverse communities.

Humans↗
PubMed1998

Infertility and early parent-infant interactions.

Approximately 50% of infertile couples will become parents through pregnancy or adoption, but they experience major difficulties while working towards this goal. Infertility treatments are associated with physical pain and psychological distress, and adoption procedures are prolonged and emotionally stressful. The extent to which these stressors alter the parenting of these couples is not known. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to examine the early parent-infant interactions in infertile couples who become parents through pregnancy or adoption. Two groups of infertile couples (30 who achieved pregnancy and 21 who adopted) and a group of 19 couples without fertility problems were observed interacting with their infants twice, 7 to 21 days after the infant's arrival and a week later, at a time when both parents were at home. Their babies were between 9 days and 5 months of age. Behaviours of the mother, father and infant were recorded every 10 seconds, beginning when the baby was picked up and ending when the baby was put down asleep or 1 1/2 hours had passed. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to compare the three groups over the observations. There were no differences between fertile and infertile biological parents. Adopted infants showed more alertness, less sleeping, more smiles, and more looking than biological infants. Adoptive mothers spent less time as the sole interactor. Adoptive parents spent more time in playing with their infants and held and touched them less than did biological parents. Infertility, therefore, does not appear to affect early parenting. In general, the amounts of behaviours exhibited by infertile biological parents were very close to those of fertile parents. Differences in the behaviours of adoptive as compared to biological parents can best be explained as responses to the behaviours of their older infants, rather than as evidence of different parenting styles.

Adoption↗
PubMed1998

Looking to care or caring to look? Technology and the rise of spectacular nursing.

New technologies, such as ultrasonography and vital function monitoring, have made nursing care more spectacular. Nurses now watch, in addition to watching over, their patients. Nursing practice increasingly shapes and is shaped by simulations and representations of the real. Visualist technologies represent a new way of knowing in nursing and a new area of nursing informatics. They also raise all the esthetic, political, and ethical dilemmas associated with looking. They raise the question: Do nurses look to care, or care to look?

Empathy↗
PubMed1997

Focus on qualitative methods. Qualitative metasynthesis: issues and techniques.

There has been an accumulation of qualitative studies in recent years, but little cumulation of the understandings gained from them. Qualitative research appears endangered both by efforts to synthesize studies and by the failure to do so. Techniques used have included reciprocal translations of key metaphors and concepts and qualitative and quantitative comparative analyses to produce narrative and theoretical integrations. The major problem yet to be resolved is developing usable and communicable systematic approaches to conducting metasynthesis projects that maintain the integrity of individual studies.

Data Interpretation, Statistical↗
PubMed1997

Exploring the gender-technology relation in nursing.

Feminist and nursing scholars have emphasized the critical role Western technology has played in the history and development of women and nursing. Yet, despite their common ground in tying both the emancipation and the subordination of women and nurses to technology, there has been virtually no association between nursing and gender-technology studies. Gender-technology studies offer nursing scholars new analytic directions and methodological tools to explore the nursing-technology relation. Nursing, in turn, offers gender-technology studies a rich empirical site to further its theoretical development.

Female↗
PubMed1997

(Ir)reconcilable differences? The debate concerning nursing and technology.

PURPOSE: To review and critique the debate concerning nursing and technology. Technology has been considered both at one and at odds with nursing. ORGANIZING CONSTRUCT: Mitcham's (1994) concepts of technological optimism and romanticism. SOURCE: Nursing literature since 1960. METHODS: Historical analysis. FINDINGS: Technological optimists in nursing have viewed technology as an extension of and as readily assimilable into humanistic nursing practice, and nursing as socially advantaged by technology. Technological romantics have viewed technology as irreconcilable with nursing culture, as an expression of masculine culture, and as recirculating existing gender and social inequalities. CONCLUSIONS: Both optimists and romantics essentialize technology and nursing, treating the two as singular and fixed entities. The (ir)reconcilability of nursing and technology may be a function of how devices are used by people in different contexts, or of the (ir)reconcilability of views of technology in nursing.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed1996

Focus on qualitative methods: Using qualitative methods in intervention studies.

Qualitative research commonly is viewed as the antithesis of the clinical trial and far removed from the immediate practical aims of intervention studies and nursing practice. Yet, qualitative methods can be used to enhance the significance and harness the benefits of clinical trials, and to emphasize the distinctive work and outcomes of nursing care. Qualitative methods are especially useful for further describing or explaining subject variation on outcome variables, verifying outcomes obtained from standardized instruments, and clarifying and evaluating interventions in their real-life contexts.

Clinical Trials as Topic↗
PubMed1996

One is the liveliest number: the case orientation of qualitative research.

The epistemological thrust of qualitative research is case oriented. Regardless of qualitative methodology or sample size, qualitative research is quintessentially about understanding a particular in the all-together. Regardless of the kind of analytic technique employed, qualitative analysis are obliged, first and foremost, to make sense of individual cases. Looking at and through each case in a qualitative project is the basis from which researchers may make idiographic generalizations and move to cross-case comparisons to construct aggregations, syntheses, or interpretations of data from and faithful to individual cases.

Case-Control Studies↗
PubMed1996

Healing fictions': stories of choosing in the aftermath of the detection of fetal anomalies.

Between the cultural story of prenatal diagnosis emphasizing the expansion of choice and the countercultural story emphasizing the lack of choice are the individual stories of choosing told by expectant and new parents after learning of the existence of a fetal impairment. The results of a qualitative, descriptive study involving 40 interviews with 15 women and 12 of their partners suggest that they had often 'backed into', as opposed to having actively chosen or refused, prenatal testing. After learning of their babies' impairments, they constructed subtly different accounts of pregnancies continued or terminated that located the moral agency for effecting these pregnancy outcomes either in themselves or elsewhere. These emplotments of choice can be summarized as nature's choice, disowned choice, choice lost, close choice and choice found. The findings raise questions concerning which of these or other constructions of choice in the aftermath of positive fetal diagnosis are the most effective in promoting psychological recovery and optimum parent-infant interactions.

Abortion, Induced↗
PubMed1996

Couples' evaluations of foreknowledge of fetal impairment.

The Western cultural presumption that knowledge is a right and a good is integral to current discussions of prenatal diagnosis. Little is known, however, about how couples obtaining positive fetal diagnoses evaluate this knowledge for their own lives and whether, or how, they are advantaged in relation to couples learning about their baby's impairment after birth. Findings from 40 interviews with expectant parents obtaining positive prenatal diagnoses suggest that couples both value and question the value of fetal foreknowledge and that this knowledge temporally relocates, rather than substantively alters, parental responses and infant outcomes.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1996

Tools of the trade: analyzing technology as object in nursing.

Key components of nursing practice are the things nurses use in their work. Despite the importance that technological objects have played in both practicing and representing the practice of nursing, they have received only tangential attention in empirical and ethical studies of nursing practice and in theories of nursing. In this paper, technology is analyzed in its mode of manifestation as "object." An analytic emphasis on technology as object is necessary to draw attention to and garner respect for the independent force that objects exert in human/machine interactions. In addition, giving conceptual primacy to the material manifestation of technology can help to clarify (even as it raises other questions about) the long-standing and somewhat bittersweet relationship between nursing and technology.

Ethics, Nursing↗
PubMed1995

A theory of the transition to parenthood of infertile couples.

A theoretical synthesis of the transition to parenthood of infertile couples is presented. The theory was derived from three studies of infertility the author conducted between 1985 and 1993. The theory is grounded in the experiences of infertile couples, and locates these experiences conceptually in the comparative context of normally fertile couples' transition to parenthood and in the domains of life transitions and illness work. Infertile couples exhibited some of the same processes as their fertile counterparts, varying in the phasing and intensity of these overlapping processes; and, they exhibited processes exclusive to them. There were also intragroup differences in the infertile couples: between adopting and childbearing couples, couples conceiving biomedically and spontaneously, and between couples conceiving with their own or donor gametes.

Adoption↗
PubMed1995

Sample size in qualitative research.

A common misconception about sampling in qualitative research is that numbers are unimportant in ensuring the adequacy of a sampling strategy. Yet, simple sizes may be too small to support claims of having achieved either informational redundancy or theoretical saturation, or too large to permit the deep, case-oriented analysis that is the raison-d'être of qualitative inquiry. Determining adequate sample size in qualitative research is ultimately a matter of judgment and experience in evaluating the quality of the information collected against the uses to which it will be put, the particular research method and purposeful sampling strategy employed, and the research product intended.

Humans↗
PubMed1995

Qualitative analysis: what it is and how to begin.

One of the most paralyzing moments in conducting qualitative research is beginning analysis, when researchers must first look at their data in order to see what they should look for in their data. Although temporally and conceptually overlapping processes, data analysis should be distinguished from interpretation. Practical suggestions for beginning analysis include getting a sense of the whole, extracting the facts, identifying key topics or major storylines and dimensionalizing their informational content, and using frameworks to reduce data.

Data Interpretation, Statistical↗
PubMed1995

Fertility status and symptoms in childbearing couples.

The symptoms of 58 pregnant couples--37 with a history of infertility and 21 without a history of infertility--were compared. The Symptomatology Inventory, a checklist of 42 common physical and psychological symptoms of pregnancy, was completed by each spouse from months 4 to 9 of pregnancy. For purposes of analysis, the individual symptoms were grouped into three categories: physical symptoms, negative affective symptoms, and positive affective symptoms. Although the infertile pregnant couples did not experience more symptoms than fertile couples, their pattern of reporting pregnancy-related symptoms was quite different. In terms of both number and type of symptoms, infertile spouses' symptoms tended to be positively related. Compared to fertile couples, the infertile couples experienced symptoms globally and were more consistent in the number of symptoms reported by each spouse. Additional research is needed to confirm these findings and to determine the implications of these differences for childbearing and the martial relationship.

Adult↗