Content area
Full text
Search terms: Practice-close research, semi-structured interviewing, data collection, qualitative research, research methods
Scientific Inquiry provides a forum to facilitate the ongoing process of questioning and evaluating practice, presents informed practice based on available data, and innovates new practices through research and experimental learning.
Practice-close research is a term that refers to nurses doing qualitative research in their areas of practice. Not surprisingly, we are often drawn to research questions that arise in our own areas of practice or that resonate as issues in our own lives that could be addressed through nursing research. For the recipients of nursing care, it is important that nurse researchers pursue these questions and integrate findings into care delivery. Yet, there are also challenges in practice-close research; these include (a) the researcher's responsibility to be explicit about her or his preconceptions about an issue, and (b) the researcher's interactions with study participants (Lykkeslet & Gjengedal, 2007).
Interviewing, the most frequently used data collection strategy in qualitative studies (Burnard, 2005; Nunkoosing, 2005; Sandelowski, 2002), is commonly used in practice-close research. The purpose of this paper is to describe for specialists in pediatric nursing a particular interviewing style: the semi-structured interview in the context of a practice-close research study.
The study on which this paper is based was a communitybased research project that examined health in families of young children with special needs. Ethics approval for the study was obtained from the University of British Columbia. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 parents (11 mothers and 4 fathers) with children between the ages of 7.5 months and 5 years. My interest in this area was based on my own experiences of having a child with special needs. Although I am not a pediatric nurse, I am very interested in family nursing, which was central to this research. Thus, my personal experiences of being a parent of a chUd receiving nursing care and other supports, partnered with my nursing self, drew me into this practice-close research project. The overall aim of the study was to examine family health and factors that supported/hindered family health among families that included a young child with special needs. During the course of the study, three research team members from the larger research team conducted the interviews...