Paper
Friday, 21 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Diverse Studies of Nursing Education
Ways of Knowing of International Nurses: An Instrumental Case Study
Patricia E. Zander, PhD, RN, Nursing, Viterbo University, La Crosse, WI, USA
Learning Objective #1: The learner will be able to briefly describe the elements that comprise the epistemology and ontology of nursing.
Learning Objective #2: The learner will be able to state the implications of the study results.
Carper (1975) identified four ways of knowing in nursing that came to be known as the epistemology of nursing in the United States. The four ways of knowing include Empirics, the science of nursing; Ethics, the moral directives of nursing; Personal, the special way nurses have of being with their patients; and Esthetics, the creativity that nurses bring to their practice. Kramer and Chinn (1988) enhanced Carper’s work by adding the creative, expressive, and assessment dimensions to the ways of knowing. In 1995, Silva, Sorrell, and Sorrell provided the ontological perspective that they considered to be missing from the previous work. While there is extensive literature on the ways of knowing in nursing independent of each other, no one had studied the ways of knowing as a single entity; or the creative, expressive, and assessment dimensions of Kramer and Chinn; nor the ontology identified by Silva et al. Also, there has been no exploration of the epistemology and ontology of nursing in the international community of nurses. This presentation will describe an instrumental case study conducted to ascertain if international nurses, who are educated through a myriad of basic nursing programs, possess the same epistemology and ontology of nursing as nurses educated in the United States. The study also looked at how the nurses’ ways of knowing changed by being students in US graduate programs.

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See more of The 17th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice (19-22 July 2006)