The general purpose of nursing research is to answer questions or to solve problems of relevance to the nursing profession, and the outcomes of the research are used to describe, to explain, to predict, and to control nursing phenomena. Furthermore, nursing research contribute growth and development of nursing profession. In this article, the author's experiences were introduced as an example that showed the relationship between growth and development of nurses and continuing research activities. In addition, the factors that supported the nurses to continue research activities were discussed. As the result, it was suggested that continuing research activities promoted the growth and development of the nurses, and that having a role model of nursing profession was important for nurses to continue research activities.

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The purpose of this study was to conceptualize occupational experiences of male nurse, and to clarify features of them as minority in nurses. Methodology for Conceptualization of Nursing was used as research methodology. Data were collected from twenty three male nurses employed at hospitals, through semi-structured interviews. As a result of continuing comparative analysis, six explanatory concepts emerged. These concepts were as follows; I) Avoiding isolation through facilitating the relationships with others. II) Seeking the significance of oneselfs existence through enjoying and losing expectations and interests. III) Attempting and failing acquisition of added values. IV) Hesitating and valuing occupation selections. V) Acquiring independence as nurse and expanding the roles through overcoming the problems. VI) Maintaining the balance of occupational and private activities. The concepts I, II and III indicate that male nurses realize they are playing the different roles from a majority of female nurses and have the "occupational experience as their dissimilar minority in nurses", which means male nurses are tossed about erasing their self foreignness or showing their specificities. Additionally, IV and V indicate that male nurses have "common occupational experience with other nurses regardless of gender difference", which means not only selecting nursing as their professional occupation anew through their occupation hunting, male nurses also find nursing occupations valuable through overcoming a wide variety of problems. Furthermore, VI indicates that male nurses have "common occupational experience with working males of their adulthood", which means male nurses give their first priority to continue their occupations under any circumstances and based on that idea, they try to enrich their occupational and personal activities to build their stable life.

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The purposes of this study were to conceptualize the research utilization in clinical settings, to explain nurses' experiences who utilize research findings to improve the quality of nursing and to clarify the feature of their experiences. This research adopted the Methodology for Conceptualization of Nursing. And data were collected through semi-structured interviews from 12 hospitals' nurses who had experiences of using research findings in clinical settings. As the result of data analysis, seven explanatory concepts emerged as the followings: 1) Being eager about scientific knowledge due to the responsibility of patients' problem-solving, 2) Feeling a spark of interest on utilization of the research findings by encounter with the exact research, 3) Determining the propriety of adoption by assessment of the research quality, 4) Adjusting the environment and clarifying the methods to utilize the research findings, 5) Revising the methods to utilize the research findings and searching for new one to overcome problems, 6) Promoting actively or abandoning passively to utilize the research findings through assessment of effectiveness of it, 7) Disclosing the process to utilize the research and continuing to utilize through understanding the significance of research findings. It was suggested that the characteristic of nurses who achieved research utilization, they ascribe the significance to scientific knowledge as a basis for nursing practice, impart the relevance of scientific knowledge to actual nursing practice, and have a flexible approach toward effective utilization of scientific knowledge. Moreover, they understand the effectiveness of utilization of research findings in clinical settings and assign the value to utilization of scientific knowledge through research utilization.

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The purpose of this study was to develop a self-evaluation scale to measure the quality of occupational experiences which hospital nurses have. This study was comprised of four phases. In phase 1, items of a scale were made based on 6 explanatory concepts of occupational experiences which hospital nurses have. In phase 2, content validity of the scale was estimated, then the scale was corrected. In phase 3, the items of the scale were selected based on the result of primary study. In phase 4, reliability and validity of the scale were tested. Based on item analysis, 30 items were selected. The final scale with six subscales contained 30 items was 5-point Likert scale. This final scale was applied to the secondary study. The scale was mailed to 1060 randomly selected hospital nurses all over Japan. The responses were 703 (66.3%) , 618 valid answers were analyzed. Coefficient alpha of the scale was 0.945, test-retest reliability was 0.811 (p=0.000). It was suggested that the scale had well-established reliability. The result of factor analysis showed the scale had well-established construct validity substantially.

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The purpose of this study was to conceptualize new graduate nurses' behavior, and to discuss the features of them. Methodology for Conceptualization of Nursing was used. During the first 3 weeks of assignment to clinical unit, data were collected through participant observation, and were analyzed using continuing comparative analysis. As a result, nine concepts emerged as follows, 1) Realizing and acquiring the lack of nursing knowledge and skills through accompanying senior nurse, 2) Discovering and identifying with senior nurse as their role model, 3) Carrying out nursing care by their own and hesitating to ask others' support related to the consciousness of responsibility which they have to do alone, 4) Failing in avoiding reception of negative evaluation and trying to recover it, 5) Dropping out from and resuming the process of nursing goal attainment, 6) Attaining nursing goal by depending on various resources, and starting to apply nursing knowledge and skills of having learned already after realizing trouble to utilize it, 7) Redacting time of task to finish within working hours, 8) Providing special nursing by accepting the support from others, 9) Individualizing nursing care and practicing nursing smoothly by progressing understanding of nursing setting. These concepts suggested that they easily cannot attain a nursing goal and easy to cause a medical malpractice. Because they hesitate to ask others' supports that too conscious of responsibility as nurse, concentrate the interest on avoiding reception of negative evaluation, and carry out nursing care as a lack of knowledge, skills and information. Furthermore, these behaviors arise that shift a position from student to nurse, take charge of plural patients. All of these results showed necessity to examine an method of the their support.

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The purpose of this study was to conceptualize faculty's behaviors relating to teaching materialization of phenomena in nursing clinical practicum, and to discuss features of the teaching activities that were necessary in order to realize teaching materialization of phenomena. Methodology for Conceptualization of Nursing was adapted. Data were collected on the interaction of faculty and students that included faculty's behaviors relating to teaching materialization of phenomena in nursing clinical practicum through participant observation without intervention and were analyzed by the method of continuing comparative analysis. Consequently, five concepts emerged. These concepts were as follows; 1) Sorting and focusing essential teaching contents through evaluation of learning activities. 2) Deciding and restructuring phenomena to teach essential teaching contents. 3) Remodeling phenomena by adding teaching resources. 4)Promoting students to understand essential teaching contents through extracting essential elements from phenomena and linking them. 5) Considering and changing teaching strategy through evaluation of teaching activities. These five concepts suggested the following. While faculty judge learning activities from the viewpoint of goal attainment, faculty focus on contents of the high speciality of nursing science which is difficult or impossible for students by themselves to acquire and make up teaching materials from phenomena in the clinical setting. In addition, faculty interpret phenomena from the viewpoint of nursing science and restructure phenomena in order to make it easy to relate phenomena and the goal of nursing practicum. In pedagogy, it is difficult to define "teaching materials" in nursing clinical practicum.

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The purpose of this study was to provide the basic data for the future research, regarding the styles common to interview questionnaire items to reveal students' experiences in nursing clinical practicum. To search the related literature, two computer data bases, the CINAHL database between1982-2002, and Igaku Chuou Zasshi between 1986-2002 were used with key words such as nursing students, education/clinical, student experiences. Then, fifteen literatures were selected as research sample. Those fifteen literatures revealed students' experiences in nursing clinical practicum by interview and specified the questionnaire items used for interview. The findings of this study indicated the followings. There were three styles of questionnaire items in researches revealed students' experiences in nursing clinical practicum. These are; 1) 'Type of questionnaire item searching the meaning of nursing clinical practicum for students', 2) 'Type of questionnaire item asking the fact about students' experiences', 3) 'Type of questionnaire item searching the students' thought, perception and feeling accompany the experiences'. The results suggested the feature of each style of questionnaire items. They were as follows, (1) 'Type of questionnaire item searching the meaning of nursing clinical practicum for students' was used to understand the event from the viewpoint of the students, (2) 'Type of questionnaire item asking the fact about students' experiences' was used to describe the event in detail, (3) 'Type of questionnaire item searching the students' thought, perception and feeling accompany the experiences' was used to probe the students' psychological state due to the particular teaching and learning activity.

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