Spiritual Definitions in Palliative Care Research Paper

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photo novellas to test the creative aptitude of nurses working in oncology and palliative care. Researchers asked how they defined spirituality and were told to select between four to six photographs out of a photo novella they captured from their work in the field to represent these feelings. The participants in the study included five female oncology and palliative nurses, all working within Atlantic Canada. Researchers claim that "these specialty areas of nursing were selected because of the life-threatening nature of patients' illnesses, end of life issues, and the associated need for spiritual care" (Burke & Evans, 2011). Essentially, nurses within palliative and oncology contexts do often help patients with spiritual care as patients prepare to deal with a variety of end of life issues. Ultimately, the primary purpose was then to test the spiritual aptitude of these nurses in a qualitative context, while also including an exploration of how they engaged in critical and creative thinking, which helps structure other roles for nurses in a variety of health care roles. Ethical procedures were guaranteed by asking for permission to use the nurses' photographs. Moreover, the study was first reviewed by the Ethics Committee board to ensure that there were no personal violations, since the study was conducted in such a personal context.

Unfortunately, the research questions and hypotheses of the study are not as clearly defined as the study purpose. In fact, it is difficult to find research questions or hypotheses within the context of the study at all. After reading the entire study, I had to make assumptions about what the research questions and hypotheses were. Essentially, the study wants to test the ability for nurses in such specialty areas on how they deal with answering and interpreting spiritual questions. I would assume then that the research questions are how well such nurses can respond to such abstract and intense questions, as patients often ask them similar questions while actually working in the field.

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Yet, there is no mention on how these specialty nurses may differ from nurses in other health care roles. A potential hypothesis could be that nurses in palliative care and oncology tend to have a deeper acceptance of spirituality and can interpret abstract notions more broadly than nurses in other areas of care. Yet, there were no other specialties included in the context of the study, so that could not be a hypothesis. Instead, I feel that the researchers just wanted to test the narrative method using the photo novella to see if it was an accurate method for qualitative research on such abstract concepts. This makes the study more inclined to exploring research methods within the field of nursing, rather than actual nursing practices. Still, this is not directly made clear by the researchers and thus the study could have been more streamlined to present clear research questions and hypotheses that would be helpful in later evaluating the results of the study.

The study used a narrative approach to open ended interviews. Nurses in oncology and palliative care were asked to define what they believed was the definition of spirituality based on their own beliefs and experiences. The nurses were then asked to choose four to six photographs out that they themselves took while working in health care to create a photo novella in order to help interpret their feelings about the subject. According to the researchers, the use of photo novellas is appropriate for qualitative research methods. They believed that photos could help articulate more abstract feelings that….....

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