ABSTRACT
Social scientific approaches to quality of life are of limited usefulness to the clinical nurse. It is difficult to transfer concepts and ideas directly from the research setting to clinical nursing practice. Perhaps the chief reason is that the social scientific researcher is principally concerned with issues of operationalisation, measurement and research design, and has the ultimate goal in mind of generating information that will be used in decision making, resource allocation or evaluation. The clinical nurse is interested instead in creating systems of care and identifying professional activities which will safeguard and promote the quality of life of patients and clients. Clinical nurses will, it is true, in all probability be interested in research into quality of life published in the literature discussed above, and may wish to use published quality of life scales in the evaluation of their own work. However, the day-to-day clinical work of most nurses is more directly concerned with promoting quality of life than with the methods that can be used to measure it, and most of the social scientific literature on quality of life has little to contribute to this.
