Undertaking a piece of research in the clinical setting is often far more
difficult than it appears from descriptions in textbooks. This paper describes
some of the challenges faced in the course of completing a non-participant
observational study that examined how health promotion practice was carried out by
hospital-based nurses in an acute setting. The challenges included deciding which
observational role to adopt, whether to use structured or unstructured
observations, which observational position to adopt, how long observation sessions
should be and how to deal with ethical issues when the researcher is also a nurse.
It is concluded that the answers to some dilemmas and challenges are not always
found in the literature and that decisions taken often depend on the researcher's
morality and pure common sense.
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