Peck Blake, Mummery Jane
Institute of Health and Wellbeing, Federation University, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.
Institute of Education and Arts, Federation University, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.
Nurs Inq. 2023 Apr;30(2):e12526. doi: 10.1111/nin.12526. Epub 2022 Oct 25.
Nursing and nurses rely upon qualitative research to understand the intricacies of the human condition. Acknowledging the subjective nature of reality and commonly founded in a constructivist epistemology, qualitative approaches offer opportunities for uncovering insights from the perspective of the individual participants, the insider's view, and the construction of representations that maintain an intimacy with the subject's realities. Debate continues, however, about what is needed for a qualitative construction to be considered an authentic understanding of a subject's realities. Authenticity in the context of qualitative research has been described as entailing consideration of a number of well-trodden dimensions: fairness, ontological, educative, catalytic and tactical. Taking these dimensional requirements as key, this paper argues that authenticity may not always be as well-developed through some of the standard practices in qualitative research as perhaps expected. In particular, qualitative understandings of authenticity stress that participants should not be merely reported on but instead should be dynamically involved in and changed by the constructions and interpretations of data developed throughout the research process. As this paper illustrates, such engagements appear problematic for qualitative research approaches that are beholden to designative commitments in the context of language and meaning-making and which tend to prioritise commonality and generality at the expense of individual authenticity. An alternative qualitative approach, Hermeneutic Constructivism, is proposed as better able to achieve the requirements of the dimensions of authenticity. As outlined, this approach is well-placed to present an understanding of human experience through a genuinely expressivist approach and transcends the stress upon the common or the general that can be pervasive and problematic.
护理及护士依靠定性研究来理解人类状况的复杂性。定性研究承认现实的主观性，通常建立在建构主义认识论基础上，它为从个体参与者的视角、局内人的观点以及构建与主体现实保持紧密联系的表征中揭示见解提供了机会。然而，对于何种定性建构才能被视为对主体现实的真实理解，仍存在争议。在定性研究背景下，真实性被描述为需要考虑一些常见的维度：公正性、本体论维度、教育性维度、催化性维度和策略性维度。本文以这些维度要求为关键，认为在定性研究的一些标准实践中，真实性可能并不总是像预期的那样得到充分发展。特别是，对真实性的定性理解强调，不应仅仅对参与者进行描述，而应让他们动态地参与到整个研究过程中对数据的建构和解释中，并由此发生改变。正如本文所说明的，对于那些在语言和意义构建背景下受制于指定性承诺、倾向于以牺牲个体真实性为代价来优先考虑共性和普遍性的定性研究方法而言，这种参与似乎存在问题。本文提出了一种替代性的定性方法——诠释建构主义，认为它更能满足真实性各维度的要求。如前所述，这种方法能够通过一种真正的表现主义方法来呈现对人类经验的理解，并且超越了对共性或普遍性的强调，而这种强调可能是普遍存在且有问题的。
