Racial and ethnic variables provide nurse researchers with many challenges. Although race and ethnicity were widely used in Nursing Research articles, the categories were not defined in the majority of papers, and methods used to determine a participant's race or ethnicity were unclear. In order to construct a common and consistent understanding of racial and ethnic categories, nurse researchers should be explicit regarding the rationale related to their use of the categories and the assumptions underlying particular racial and ethnic categorizations.

Modern and postmodern scholars are addressing the crisis in masculinity by questioning the meaning of masculinity and by rethinking masculinity, male development, gender, and identity. This article explicates current modern humanist positions and postmodern positions on these topics. The first section summarizes contemporary theories advanced by scholars in the relatively new discipline of men's studies. The second section presents postmodern positions exploring sex as a biological given, the emerging critiques of differentiating sex and gender, and poststructural psychoanalytic positions on simultaneous production of individual subjectivity (sense of self), masculine identity, and society. Implications of these perspectives are identified.