Nurse researcher: a study of a contradiction in terms?

Despite considerable top-down pressure and numerous professional body initiatives, a persistent shortfall in published nursing research has been noted. Numerous explanations have been put forward to account for this which implicate issues at both the individual/psychological and the structural/ organizational levels. However, one area which has not yet been properly addressed is that of role appropriateness, in that research skills and activities may be construed as being incompatible with the traditional role expectations and values of nursing. To test this proposition, two groups of qualifed nurses were each required to consider six descriptors of an imaginary nurse following the paradigm of Asch's (1946) seminal Central Trait Theory study. Of these, five adjectives were identical for both groups, but the sixth descriptor was manipulated, such that one group received "good clinician' and the other "good researcher'. The subjects then had to rate this imaginary nurse along each of 15 bipolar traits. The groups' ratings were compared using a series of unrelated t-tests. The results indicated that if a nurse was described as a good researcher she or he was also assumed to be more ambitious, a poorer communicator, less kind, stronger, more logical, more controlled, more confident, less popular, more ruthless, more rational and more analytical than if she or he was described as a good clinician. These findings suggest that the qualities attributed to a good nurse are dissonant with those attributed to a good researcher and, in this way, the mutual incompatibility of each role's requirements may serve as an obstacle to the development of research with nursing.