Abstract
I have had the great honour of serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Nordic Journal of Nursing Research since it was launched five years ago. It has been an academic challenge as well as an opportunity to gain insight into to the broad spectrum of nursing research beyond my own area of research. After reading Professor Lisbeth Fagerström’s editorial ‘Glimpses from Professor Eriksson’s life work’, I am reminded of the scholarly discussions in the early nineties that focused on methodological issues in relationship to theory development. Alongside these discussions, in Sweden, there was an urgency to rank nursing care as an academic subject in order to provide education on a university level. Many efforts to define nursing were unsuccessful in reaching a consensus. Instead, the task of defining nursing as an academic discipline was replaced by a recognition that the domain of nursing science is based on both theoretical and empirical research. Nurse research pioneers in the Nordic countries initiated courses for nurses in PhD programmes with invited nurse-researchers from America and the UK.
Many of the well-known American nurse-theorists I met as a PhD student, foremost among these being Hildegard Peplau, Afaf Meleis, Jean Watson and Patricia Benner, influenced my thoughts about the importance of theory development in nursing. In an article I wrote in 1995, I argued that developing nursing as a science requires both theoretical and empirical approaches. In an article I wrote in 2005, I emphasized that the progress of nursing science is most successful when research collaboration occurs on an international level. Today, 15 years later, it is my experience that the debates about whether nursing is a science or not, and methodological splits between qualitative vs quantitative research have been modified by collaborative research that is based on shared values and health-related goals.