Studies of the moral reasoning of nurses yield inconsistent findings. Using Cronbach and Meehl's interpretive framework, the author demonstrates the lack of construct validity for Kohlberg's theory of moral development and related measures of moral reasoning. Gilligan's relational theory of moral orientations is proposed as an alternative theory worth testing in nurse samples.
School nurses provide an important role in the continuity of health care especially for adolescents who are at high risk for significant health concerns. The purpose of this study was to assess adolescents' health information needs and identify their preferences for accessing health information. Using an inductive qualitative research design, 11 focus groups were conducted with a convenience sample of 101 junior high and high school students in suburban northeastern Illinois. The students identified a variety of health concerns and emphasized the need for accessible, high-quality, and personally relevant information. Most students favored taking an active role in learning about their health. They preferred to directly access information from qualified individuals within comfortable, trusting, and respectful relationships or to indirectly retrieve information from reliable resources. Finally, students emphasized the need for privacy and a variety of learning options depending on the specific health topic.
The author begins by telling "Mike's story," a personal narrative account of an interaction with a patient. "Mike's story" provides a lens through which the author explores an alternative paradigm for nursing ethics--a paradigm grounded in a relational ethic of care. Mike's case is used to demonstrate how the moral experience of the nurse is distorted by the standard of moral rationality in traditional biomedical ethics. An interpretive analysis of "Mike's story" attempts to capture some of the fundamental assumptions of a relational ethic of care. The author identifies the benefits of grounding a theory of nursing ethics in nurses' conflicting stories of caregiving and encourages nurses to claim those stories that reflect the moral foundation of nursing.
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