A nurse is conducting her master's thesis research in the unit in which she works as a staff nurse. The focus of her thesis is burned children's pain, with versus without a child life specialist assisting the child

Question

She is providing child life specialist presence every other day at the mid-morning dressing change. For obvious reasons, she wants to keep everything else consistent for the four contiguous days of data collection. On the second day of four, with the child life specialist present, one child demonstrates poor pain control. The nurse researcher would ordinarily advocate for more pain medication for this child, but if she does, she will not be able to compare the data with that of the previous day. This is an example of which of the following?
a. Serendipity
b. Subject as object
c. Role conflict
d. Passive resistance

Answer 1

ANS: C
As a researcher, one is observing and recording events. Nurses who conduct clinical research often experience a conflict between their researcher role and their clinician role during data collection. In some cases, the researcher's involvement in the event, such as providing physical or emotional care to a patient during data collection, could alter the event and thus bias the results. It would be difficult to generalize the findings to other situations in which the researcher was not present to intervene. However, the needs of patients must take precedence over the needs of the study.