Understanding Theory and Research Frameworks

Theories help to: Establish a way to think about nursing phenomena Provide a link between concepts Clarify the concepts and variables that can be measured in a research study

During my research internship with older Black adults, we asked them to reminisce with us about their lives. Based upon what was written in the literature, we were trying to help them become less depressed and improve life satisfaction through reminiscence. I know…this was an unusual study for nursing. However, my advisor suggested I make note of things that I found relevant for my own dissertation research…

I DID!! Just about everyone I reminisced with spoke about religiousness and how much it was an important part of their lives. Every once in a while, I noticed issues with implications for health outcomes. One woman in particular said that she didn’t take her diabetes medicines because “God didn’t make those medicines!” Wow – that’s a big deal. I spoke with my advisor about working with her on her study and somehow integrating religiousness. I could just go to the literature and find a survey that measures religiousness and then we could just take it from there….

I searched and searched and searched the literature for a long time. My literature searches were initially broad and then became more complex - combining key words to limit my findings (you might want to remember that for the exam) There were surveys but based upon what I know from my own life experiences, much of what was written on the surveys either didn’t reflect the experiences of diverse populations; had wording that could be difficult for research participants to understand; or didn’t express the complexity of religiousness. Soooo….

I had my research problem: many of the existing surveys that measure religiousness were not developed using diverse populations. Therefore, the content of many of the surveys was not as representative as they could be. Some surveys were okay Significance of the problem: health disparities have been increasing among Blacks for the past 40 years. Given that religion can impact health beliefs and outcomes, having a valid survey that measures religiousness can help nurses understand how religiousness affects health beliefs and health behaviors

I ended up testing one survey that I thought might be usable – the Fetzer survey. The purpose of my research was to test the survey for understandability, language, and acceptability in a sample of community- dwelling, older Black adults.

Great. Easy enough. Now…… How do I even begin to know what part of the survey to examine??? The survey is huge – it has many different ways to look at religiousness and many questions (over 200!!) Should I examine all of those questions? Are they actually all something I am interested in? In my experience, the phenomena that I was specifically interested in was the state or involvement with an organized system of practices, beliefs, rituals, or symbols as they relate to the sacred – this was my conceptual definition of religiousness.

Since I was clear on the definition, I needed a way to find which items on the survey to examine. I needed a conceptual framework – or a way to think about the concept or phenomenon of religiousness so that I could identify the survey items that I was interested in I ended up using A Multidimensional Model of Religiousness for African Americans (Levin, Taylor, & Chatters, 1995). The conceptual model is shown on the next slide. Note: this model might apply to other ethnic groups as well, but I wanted to be sure I found one that was tested using African American research subjects so that I knew it would be valid.

The model shows how the concepts in the framework are related to one another. The model demonstrates how variables relate to the concept of organizational religiousness. The conceptual model shown here is one that shows a somewhat abstract concept – religiousness. There are other kinds of frameworks shown on the next slide

Middle range theories/frameworks – they are much more concrete and apply more specifically to clinical practice Frameworks for physiologic studies – provide concrete descriptions of relationships among physiologic variables

By this point, I am sure that some of your heads are spinning from this idea of frameworks. Our text gives much more detail but you basically need to take home the following understandings: Frameworks help researchers to look at or “frame” a problem Researchers can’t assume that they know how to think about an idea – they rely upon established theories or models to give them more structure

Next step? Read Chapter 7, which gives very specific information, and we will continue to pick this apart throughout the week. Alright, let’s get started!!