Nursing Research and Statistics

Managing clinical responsibility is a challenge for nurses and nursing profession. Nurses require extraordinary range of knowledge, skills, and talents to provide quality care to their patients. Historically, nurses’ practices were based on certain types of knowledge. The mechanisms that nurses usually used to provide patient care were as follows: traditions and customs, common sense, authority, experience, intuition, logical reasoning, and assembled knowledge. Carper stated that there are four types of knowledge that nurses use to base their practice, namely empirics, aesthetics, ethics, and personal knowledge.

Park had described three types of knowledge. They are representational knowledge (to describe, explain or understand a phenomenon), relational knowledge (knowing a person both affectively and cognitively), and reflective knowledge (bringing changes by ref lecting on agreeing to the values, which inform the world in which we live). Whatever may be the type of knowledge, it gets outdated quickly in today’s scientific world. The half-life of scientific knowledge is getting shorter than before. Nurses must access and evaluate extensive clinical information and incorporate it into their clinical decision-making to provide quality care in a compassionate manner. This is possible only through the efficient use of research findings. This can be achieved by purposeful reading of research reports and research summaries in the practice area and by conducting or participating in research studies to develop new knowledge. Nursing research generates new knowledge that boosts scientific practices and is the only valid knowledge that nurses can rely upon in their practice. So, nurses need to be cognizant and proficient in the research process.