Critique of qualitative research data collection methods and ethical protections

¶ … ideographic tradition and seeks to focus on the insider's world and the meanings that are attached to behaviour. While this is a general view of qualitative studies each qualitative design has unique foci. Hudacek (2008) examined the concept of caring in the work of nurses using a phenomenological design. Phenomenology gives attention to the subjective social reality. It gives value to the individual experience of the actor even within highly structured organizations. It is through the everyday experiences that meaning is constructed. The use of phenomenology is therefore highly consistent with the attempt to understand the meaning of caring. The design and the stated purpose of the researcher are highly congruent. The researcher noted that the purpose of the study was to "describe the dimensions of caring." Phenomenology is useful for unearthing the individuals understanding of their own behavior and consequently the meaning they attach to particular actions.

Another reason the design is in harmony with the purpose of the study is identified by the author; there is a lack of narratives of nursing care. The nursing profession has an acute absence of stories that in their collective strength describe not only what nurses do but why. The "why" component is a critical aspect of the nursing profession. It determines how actors understand their roles, and the behaviors that are consistent with those roles. These stories take the profession beyond the job description and into meaning behind what is done. The most useful manner to accomplish this is through the use of a phenomenological approach. The introduction of the narratives of nurses is an attempt to fill a lacunae in the literature.

The data for this study was collected from a sample of two hundred nurses. Twenty-five percent of the sample can from nurses outside of the United States. The nurses were required to respond to an initial question which sort to evoke a caring story. The data then constituted the narrative mailed in by the nurses. The author notes that this approach allowed the nurses to think and consider deeply while responding. The method of data collection while useful has some important limitations that should be considered. There is little doubt that the nurses would recount a particular story and it would possibly be the one that stood out most in their mind. The author does not address the concern of memory decay or embellishments to the story. When people are asked to remember they are invariably asked recall experiences that the mind has processed and reprocessed. Recall and memory is highly flawed. The absence of any probing which would have accompanied an in depth interview limits the usefulness of the data.

In this instance an in depth interview would have provided the author not only with the stories that were desired but opportunity to assess other elements. The author is unable to clarify elements of the story in print that may have been confusing. The entire assumption of the work is that meaning has a subjective and individual quality to it that requires attention. While many stories were collected the challenge is that the full dynamic of meaning could not be adequately explored. The author was unable to ask clarifying questions or probe for greater understanding of what the respondent meant.

The approach used to analyze the data supported the nature of the data. The data collected were a collection of narrative accounts of an event. The data were analyzed using the framework of existential phenomenology. This approach was drawn from the work of Giorgi (1985); the approach involved the reduction of the data into analytical categories through getting a "sense of the nurse's stories." Consequently the procedures consider the nature of the data and attempt to extract meaningful patterns from the set of stories. The underlying assumption is that across the data clear patterns will emerge because of the repetition of specific themes.