ABSTRACT
Nursing care is neither easily taught, nor easily learned. Most difficult, is researching nursing care: documenting the art of nursing, describing and eliciting the nurse–patient interaction, the meaning of care to the patient, and the effects and outcomes of such care. Such description requires introspective understanding, interpretative insight, and the creation of theories; it requires identification of interventions, the production of evidence that reveals effectiveness, and it thereby furthers the development of nursing practice. This is what we call qualitative nursing research.
