Nursing

As a humanistic clinical science, nursing research must attend to both method and substance in its quest for knowledge. Research is a tool of science. The research process is the link between the abstractions of theory-which apply to everyone in general and no one in particular-and the patterns discerned from the analysis of empirical data collected about reality. Actual human beings fall somewhere between. Current nursing literature abounds with books and articles on how to conduct and evaluate research. Less is said about why. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the substantive dimension of nursing research and to propose directions for future study.