Thorne S, Kirkham S R, MacDonald-Emes J
University of British Columbia School of Nursing, Vancouver, Canada.
Res Nurs Health. 1997 Apr;20(2):169-77. doi: 10.1002/(sici)1098-240x(199704)20:2<169::aid-nur9>3.0.co;2-i.
Despite nursing's enthusiastic endorsement of the applicability of qualitative research approaches to answering relevant clinical questions, many nurse researchers have been hesitant to depart from traditional qualitative research methods. While various derivations of phenomenology, grounded theory, and ethnography have been popularized within qualitative nursing research, the methodological principles upon which these approaches are based reflect the foundations and objectives of disciplines whose aims are sometimes quite distinct from nursing's domain of inquiry. Thus, as many nurse researchers have discovered, nursing's unique knowledge mandate may not always be well served by strict adherence to traditional methods as the "gold standard" for qualitative nursing research. The authors present the point of view that a non-categorical description, drawing on principles grounded in nursing's epistemological mandate, may be an appropriate methodological alternative for credible research toward the development of nursing science. They propose a coherent set of strategies for conceptual orientation, sampling, data construction, analysis, and reporting by which nurses can use an interpretive descriptive approach to develop knowledge about human health and illness experience phenomena without sacrificing the theoretical or methodological integrity that the traditional qualitative approaches provide.
尽管护理界积极认可定性研究方法在回答相关临床问题方面的适用性，但许多护理研究人员一直不愿背离传统的定性研究方法。虽然现象学、扎根理论和民族志的各种衍生方法在定性护理研究中已得到推广，但这些方法所基于的方法论原则反映了某些学科的基础和目标，而这些学科的目标有时与护理的研究领域截然不同。因此，正如许多护理研究人员所发现的那样，严格遵循传统方法作为定性护理研究的 “黄金标准”，可能并不总能很好地满足护理独特的知识要求。作者提出了一种观点，即基于护理认识论要求的原则进行非分类描述，可能是开展可靠研究以推动护理科学发展的一种合适的方法论选择。他们提出了一套连贯的策略，用于概念定位、抽样、数据构建、分析和报告，通过这些策略，护士可以使用解释性描述方法来发展关于人类健康和疾病体验现象的知识，同时又不牺牲传统定性方法所提供的理论或方法论完整性。
