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Aim: To review and discuss the ethical and practical considerations about paying patient and caregiver participants in nursing research and, based on this review, to develop a set of guiding principles about payment of participants., Background: To increase recruitment and retention, it is becoming increasingly common in nursing research to provide some form of payment to participants. The risk is that the promise of a payment may influence a patient or caregiver's decision to participate in research. However, research ethics protocols seldom provide explicit guidance about paying participants. Even where formal policies or fee schedules exist, there is little consistency in determining how payments should be calculated or administered. This has resulted in highly variable payment practices between locations, disciplines and institutions., Design: Discussion paper., Data Sources: PubMed, MEDLINE with Full Text, CINAHL and Health Source (Nursing/Academic Edition) were searched for terms related to paying research participants published between 2000 - August 2016., Implications for Nursing: Nurse researchers must comply with international, national and institutional ethical standards. Important ethical and practical considerations should guide the decision-making process about whether to pay research participants and how to determine the nature or value of the payment. Guiding principles can support researchers by highlighting key factors that may direct their decision-making in this regard., Conclusion: A deeper understanding of the fundamental ethical and practical considerations is needed to support researchers in their deliberations about paying participants in nursing research., (© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Aim: To discuss ethical and methodological challenges related to in-depth interviews with patients and partners when interviewed together or separately., Background: Increased interest in exploring illness phenomena from both patients' and partners' perspectives has emerged. The decision about how to collect data is challenging. Patients and partners can be interviewed separately or together; in both scenarios researchers face complex questions of methodology and ethics. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on individual or joint interviewing and the effect of absence/presence of the partner on data collection., Design: Discussion paper that draws on data from three phenomenological studies., Data Sources: Referring to three cases from our phenomenological studies, we discuss the different types of ethical and methodological dilemmas faced when undertaking joint and separate interviews with couples. Furthermore, we discuss how the unexpected presence of the partner potentially influences the data gathered from the patient., Implication for Nursing: The cases demonstrate the interrelatedness of ethics and methodology in studies based on in-depth interviews with couples. Nurse researchers may be caught up in a dilemma between ethical concerns and methodological considerations. We argue that the presence of the partner during an interview session might influence the data and favour expressions of shared rather than individual experiences of the phenomenon studied. Furthermore, we argue that ethical concerns must be given higher priority than methodology when interviewing couples., Conclusion: An increased awareness of the tension between ethical and methodological challenges in joint or individual interviewing with patients and partners is necessary, as this issue is underexposed., (© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Aims: This paper is a report of a study designed to: (i) describe issues and techniques of translation of standard measures for use in international research; (ii) identify a user-friendly and valid translation method when researchers have limited resources during translation procedure; and (iii) discuss translation issues using data from a pilot study as an example., Background: The process of translation is an important part of cross-cultural studies. Cross-cultural researchers are often confronted by the need to translate scales from one language to another and to do this with limited resources., Method: The lessons learned from our experience in a pilot study are presented to underline the importance of using appropriate translation procedures. The issues of the back-translation method are discussed to identify strategies to ensure success when translating measures., Findings: A combined technique is an appropriate method to maintain the content equivalences between the original and translated instruments in international research. There are several possible combinations of translation techniques. However, there is no gold standard of translation techniques because the research environment (e.g. accessibility and availability of bilingual people) and the research questions are different., Conclusions: It is important to use appropriate translation procedures and to employ a combined translation technique based on the research environment and questions.

Aim: This paper highlights the sometimes problematic matter of access to the field in clinical ethnographic research by discussing a hypothetical scenario of an instance of change in the terms of access., Background: A review of the methodological literature about research access revealed that there was little in the nursing literature about this issue, although anecdotally many nurse researchers reveal that access is not unproblematic and requires active maintenance to ensure smooth operation of a project. However, in returning to literature in sociology and anthropology, where gaining access for fieldwork is not considered so routine, we found much in the literature about dilemmas, predicaments and conflicts over access, confidentiality and anonymity that were not mentioned in nursing research about access to clinical areas. We returned also to the ethical and legal framework guiding access practices so as to explore the issues in fieldwork situations., Discussion: In exploring the problems arising from maintaining confidentiality, safety of participants and researchers, it is clear that the much-vaunted insider status is both a boon and a burden. Intimate and inquisitive research using ethnographic techniques has the potential to unsettle organizations and workers through the very processes used to undertake the research., Conclusion: Ethical comportment is not enough to protect a study. A more overt and less naïve approach to access for fieldwork is required to better inform future nurse researchers how to maintain access to the field and the requirement of constant negotiation and adjustment.

Aim: The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the issues we have confronted when generating and analysing dialogue data by using electronic mail., Background: The decision to use email for our research arose from our developing understanding of some of the consequences of illness that people living with chronic illness confront in their lives. As researchers, we recognized the potential of the Internet for computer-mediated communication using email for communication between researchers and research participants., Discussion: We consider the functional aspects of generating data by email, such as the software needed, and then explore the issues encountered during the research process including ethical considerations, fluctuating participation, participants' familiarity with using email, facilitating lurkers towards participation, establishing group norms, and the role of the facilitator., Conclusion: As a collaborative inquiry, email conversation allowed us to spend time with participants over 2 years to explore chronic illness experience. However the scope and viability of computer-mediated communication as a qualitative method of research remains relatively unexplored, hence this paper.

Aim: The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss the ethical considerations that have confronted and challenged the research team when researchers facilitate conversations using private electronic mail discussion lists., Background: The use of electronic mail group conversations, as a collaborative data generation method, remains underdeveloped in nursing. Ethical challenges associated with this approach to data generation have only begun to be considered. As receipt of ethics approval for a study titled; 'Describing transition with people who live with chronic illness' we have been challenged by many ethical dilemmas, hence we believe it is timely to share the issues that have confronted the research team. These discussions are essential so we can understand the possibilities for research interaction, communication, and collaboration made possible by advanced information technologies., Discussion: Our experiences in this study have increased our awareness for ongoing ethical discussions about privacy, confidentiality, consent, accountability and openness underpinning research with human participants when generating data using an electronic mail discussion group. We describe how we work at upholding these ethical principles focusing on informed consent, participant confidentiality and privacy, the participants as threats to themselves and one another, public-private confusion, employees with access, hackers and threats from the researchers., Conclusion: A variety of complex issues arise during cyberspace research that can make the application of traditional ethical standards troublesome. Communication in cyberspace alters the temporal, spatial and sensory components of human interaction, thereby challenging traditional ethical definitions and calling to question some basic assumptions about identity and ones right to keep aspects of it confidential. Nurse researchers are bound by human research ethics protocols; however, the nature of research by electronic mail generates moral issues as well as ethical concerns. Vigilance by researchers is required to ensure that data are viewed within the scope of the enabling ethics approval.

Background: Nurses conducting clinical research frequently encounter ethically challenging situations that require careful analysis if the decisions taken are to be in the best interests of participants, researchers and society. There is a lack of literature which discusses the ethical aspects of the nurse's role in clinical research studies., Aim: The aim of this paper is to discuss the ethical conflicts and decisions taken during a combined qualitative and quantitative study of patients' experiences whilst awaiting coronary bypass surgery., Discussion: Ethical conflict arose because, despite having gained ethics approval for a non-interventional study, the researcher became concerned for the health of some research participants, whose condition was observed to have deteriorated. During the course of the study four of the 70 participants died. As a result, changes to the original research protocol were negotiated and subsequently the researcher intervened in cases where participants' clinical condition had worsened., Conclusion: Nurses conducting clinical research studies can face serious ethical dilemmas, particularly if participants' health is at risk. This paper demonstrates the potential for both role conflict and role convergence in nursing research. We contend that since the roles of researcher and clinician are not mutually exclusive, the interface between the two requires further discussion. The paper may to help inform other researchers who struggle with the issue of non-intervention when presented with research participants in need of professional nursing care.