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This paper explores the application of positionality and reflexivity drawing on the experience of a British Minority Ethnic (BME) group senior nurse researching nurses with the same ethnic heritage in an IPA study. It explores how using IPA informed reflexivity and positionality as a researcher who shared the same ethnicity with the research participants. The IPA study allowed for the exploration of Internationally Educated Nurses' (IENs) perspectives on their integration into British healthcare and their navigation of career progression. The central aims of an IPA study are to understand the participant's world, its description, the development of a clear, and open interpretative analysis with a descriptive focus on the social, cultural and theoretical context, and the participant's sense-making of their lived experience. In this paper, we discuss how the lead researcher employed reflexivity, stated his intentionality and positionality in the conduct of the IPA study. This paper discusses some examples of the effects of positionality and reflexivity in the conduct of research by researchers of different racial background, and explicate the influence of personal and professional experiences of a researcher in using reflexivity and positionality to ensure cross-cultural validity and reliability of an IPA research. This paper concludes that appropriate use of reflexivity and positionality in an IPA study may recognise the personal and professional influence of a researcher's experiences on the research process, including their ethnicity., (© 2024 The Author(s). Nursing Inquiry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

A focus group is usually understood as a group of people brought together by a researcher to interact as a group. Focus group research explicitly uses interaction as part of its methodology. This article summarises the practice of running focus groups, explores the nature of focus group data and provides an example of focus group analysis.

Academic nurses are increasingly turning to bibliometrics to assess the state and status of research publication in nursing in countries around the world. Early bibliometric studies were carried out by Cattell as part of a project to advance research in psychology in the early decades of the 20th century. There are some echoes in nursing's moves to increase its standing over the last 40 years. The interpretation of bibliometric studies can reveal embedded values about academic disciplinary activity and normative views of scientific work. Patterns of publishing by nurse academics appear increasingly to resemble those in biomedicine as a whole., (© 2011 The Author. International Nursing Review © 2011 International Council of Nurses.)

Aim: This paper raises for debate the issue of how humanist ideas have been taken up by nurse scholars, particularly in research literature., Background: Many nurses from the mid-1970s onwards have described and promoted humanism as an appropriate philosophical basis for nursing practice and research. This has been partly in an attempt to sharply differentiate the profession from medicine, and later, managerialism, which have been represented as reductionist and failing to adequately respond to the whole patient., Methods: A summary of definitions of humanism and critiques of humanism in broad philosophical literature is followed by an examination and critique of literature appearing in PubMed published within nursing scholarship from 1976 to 2007 which discusses or promotes humanism in nursing practice or research., Findings: Writers have attempted to enhance the importance of nursing by associating it with the humanistic project of accepting responsibility for realizing our human potential. They have promoted a version of research which is qualitative and centres on understanding individual lifeworlds of research participants because of a strong valuing of the experiences and perspectives of the individual. Much of the literature on this topic describes this humanism in dualistic contrast to medico-scientific reductionism and objectivity., Conclusion: Some of the presentations of humanistic nursing lack rigour and can be seen as doing little more than reproducing professional ideology. Scholars and others in the field of nursing could take the trouble to submit these ideologies to proper scrutiny.

Modern British nursing developed from the mid-nineteenth century and was seen as a morally purifying activity and as a potential force for social cohesion. It was also considered an activity fit for women. However, it embodied a fundamental tension within Victorian sensibility between a kind of rationalistic utilitarianism and a faith in transcendent values. This paper explores this tension and suggests that it can be detected in current debates about practice and evidence in nursing in the contemporary context of a rise of managerialism in public services.

Aim: This paper attempts to illuminate some of the factors necessary to influence policy, using recent changes in the UK research policy as a case study., Background: Changes in the UK research policy have shown how the profession can successfully influence a government agenda., Methods: The paper critically reviews recent UK research policy with relevance for nursing., Results: Successful policy change in nursing requires a contingent alignment of professional and governmental agendas., Conclusions: Although nursing research has made significant gains over the last 10 years, there is need for the continued development of politically minded research leadership, lest these gains be lost.

Aims of the Study: This paper uses the findings of a recent bibliometric analysis of published UK nursing research to ask whether the field is characterized by a fundamental split between two underlying areas of research interest. These can be termed 'endogenous' and 'exogenous'. The former term describes research which tends to be concerned with problems and issues to do with nursing as a profession; the latter is concerned with problems and issues centring around the nursing of patients., Design/methods: Papers in the Wellcome Trust's Research Outputs Database (ROD), a database of UK biomedical research, were analysed. Nursing papers published between 1988 and 1995 numbered 1,845, just less than 1% of the total papers in the ROD., Results/findings: Analysis of the subfield identified that nursing research was atypical of biomedical research as a whole in a number of ways. One difference was that usually in biomedical research there is a general correlation between numbers of funders acknowledged on a paper, numbers of authors, and esteem of the journal in which a paper appears. In nursing there was, if anything, a tendency for highly esteemed papers to have fewer authors and be less likely to have acknowledged funding. However, the apparently endogenous and exogenous papers have quite different characteristics. This paper explores this apparent difference and possible reasons for this difference and will briefly compare nursing research with some other newly emerging social and academic groups., Conclusions: Thinking of nursing research outputs in this way can provide insight into the existence of different reward systems influencing nurse researchers. However, it is impossible to draw too confident a differentiation without reading each individual paper and making judgements about whether they are 'endogenous' or 'exogenous', a practice generally beyond the scope of bibliometric practice.

Aim: The objective of this study was to investigate nursing research, including topics, funding and publication., Method: A database of published biomedical research set up by the Wellcome Trust was analysed for nursing research., Results: Topics covered in nursing research were found to be diverse, with mental health nursing and nurse education the major areas. Multi-authorship is lower than in biomedical research generally. The most prolific areas of publication are London SE postcodes and Manchester. Only about a third of nursing research appears to be funded., Conclusion: Nursing research was found to be the fastest growing field of biomedical research during the period analysed (1988-1995).

In this paper we examine approaches to undertaking nursing research and building research capacity in higher education institutions in the United Kingdom (UK). First we review some of the main responses in the literature to the last two Research Assessment Exercises (RAE), then we report findings from a small study of nursing departments which entered the last RAE and finally we speculate on the likely future of nursing research in the light of recent education and health policy. We suggest that many of the difficulties experienced are an effect of contradictory health and education policies and rival ways of assessing research performance. Nursing education is caught in the 'pincer movement' of stringency in both sectors. In addition, the challenges of the RAE and the necessity to earn income from contracting with National Health Service (NHS) education and training consortia for teaching represent an outworking of two rival views of the role of higher education, broadly an elitist view and one that sees higher education as a supplier of the workforce needs of industry. In addition to this, the NHS R&D (research and development) strategy provides an alternative arena for collaboration, funding and reputation to that constructed by the RAE.