Discovery of Restrictive Factors of Research Utilization by Nurses

This paper describes the views of clinical nurses regarding the utilization of nursing research in practice. Many studies have taken a quantitative approach and have focused on why nurses constrain to develop research for nursing and research participation. There is a need to understand the factors restricting clinical nurses in using research findings. The aim of this study was to discover practising nurse's view of factors they perceived as restricte to their research utilization. Data were collected within a 6 months period by means of face-to face interviews followed by one session of focus group. Analysis was undertaken using a qualitative content analysis aided by MAXQDA software. In this study, the findings disclosed some key themes perceived by nurses as restrictive to them in using research “level of support to be active in research”, “to be research minded”, “the extent of nurses knowledge and skills about research and research utilization”, “level of educational preparation relating to using research”, “theory –practice gap”, and “administration and executive challenges in clinical setting”. This study identifies constraints that require to be overcome for clinical nurses to get actively involved in research utilization. In this study, nurses were generally interested in using research findings. However, they felt restricted because of lack of time, lack of peer and manager support and limited knowledge and skills about research process. This study adds a qualitative perspective about the subject under study. Albeir the findings are not generalizable, they support quantitative study findings regarding this subject. This study also confirms that research utilization and the change to research nursing practice are complex issues which require both organizational and educational efforts.