Practical Vision and Research

Abstract

CONTEMPORARY nursing research articles are replete with suggestions relative to the need for, and ways of facilitating, the collaboration of nursing "practitioners" and "researchers" in the conduct of nursing research.1 This movement can be conceptualized as an attempt to promote some change in the present relationship among nurses which would result in improved nursing practice. Now, the specific types of change sought in dealing with the perceived problem, and the methods employed to achieve these are inexorably linked to the initial interpretation of the problem. This is simply to say that should the rationale behind the need for change be tenuous or based on faulty assumptions, one could question, the validity of the change sought or the efficacy of the methods employed to achieve it or both. In this paper the writer does not take issue with the validity of the change sought: That is, that all nurses be involved in the continuous study of nursing practice. It is rather the way in which the problem to be solved by this change has been interpreted and the methods suggested to achieve this goal which are to be challenged. Looking first at the nature of the problem. In stating that "practitioners" and "researchers" should be helped to pursue cooperative ventures, one is accepting as fact the idea that nurses are dichoto-mously distributed between these two roles, or that these are two of a number of mutually exclusive roles assumed by nurses. Practice and research in this model are conceived as "two types of skill" and "two points of view" which must be integrated.