Misusing phenomenology in nursing research: identifying the issues

The debate over what actually constitutes nursing has raged fiercely for years. Traditionally, the influence of the medical hegemony has had a profound effect on nursing’s development (1), promoting a traditionalist, positivist approach to its future. This has fuelled the idea of nursing as science, and heavily influenced early research methods in nursing, which adopted primarily an empirical, reductionist, objective approach (2). Nursing has been slow to develop its own body of research, perhaps because of the inability to define what nursing is. One consequence has been that nurses in general have developed little appreciation and understanding of research. Initial development of a research method for nursing followed the methods of the day, namely an empirical approach. In more recent years, partly as a result of the development and influence of the social sciences, there has been a move towards nursing as an art as well as a science (2), resulting in a more humanistic approach to research. Phenomenology and grounded theory are