Nurses work in complex situations with daily challenges, where the needs of each patient represent unique demands. Action research helps nurses to investigate their practices as reflective practitioners, allowing them to ask 'What is going on? How do we understand the existing situation? How do we improve it?' This book supports nurses in investigating their own professional practices in order to develop the new insights and approaches: * embodying holistic perspectives in dialogical and relational forms of individual and organisational learning, * equal emphasis on processes and outcomes; * welcoming all participants' contributions , and listening to all voices; * developing a patient-centred focus where people are involved in their own healing; * building communities of enquiring practices. This book is intended for undergraduate student nurses, qualified practising nurses in clinical settings who may or may not be engaged in formal professional education courses and nurse educators and managers.
Jean McNiff is Professor of Educational Research at York St John University, UK. She is also a Visiting Professor at UiT the Arctic University of Norway, and at the Beijing Normal University and Ningxia Teachers' University, People's Republic of China. Jean took early retirement from her position as deputy head teacher of a large secondary school in Dorset, UK. She went into business for herself, and developed her writing. Her textbooks on action research and professional education are now used internationally on workplace-based professional education courses and on higher degree courses. Jean provides interdisciplinary consultancy work to institutions around the world where she gives lectures and conducts workshops on planning, doing and writing action research. Jean aims to contribute to personal and social betterment through educational research. She encourages everyone to make their stories public in the form of their personal and collaborative theories of practice; and she firmly believes that each individual is able to contribute to social and planetary wellbeing by explaining how they hold themselves accountable for what they do. In this way she links education with moral accountability. She tries to bring the university to everyday contexts, and everyday contexts into the university, for it is only by involving everyone, she feels, that the world will become a better place for us all.
PART 1: WHAT IS ACTION RESEARCH? WHAT IS ITS RELEVANCE TO NURSING? Chapter 1: What do you need to know about action research? Chapter 2: Why should nurses do action research? Chapter 3: Ethical issues PART 2: HOW DO YOU DO ACTION RESEARCH? Chapter 4: Planning and designing action research Chapter 5: Drawing up and carrying out action plans Chapter 6: Monitoring practices and gathering data Chapter 7: Monitoring practices and gathering data PART 3: SIGNIFICANCE OF YOUR ACTION RESEARCH Chapter 8: Writing up your action research Chapter 9: The significance of your action research
In our evidence-led culture, this is a research text with a difference. By helping nurses to research their own practice and generate their own evidence, this gently subversive book attempts to restore professional power to practising nurses. -- Gary Rolfe
