BACKGROUND: Patients having cardiac symptoms often delay for hours before seeking treatment. Educational programs have had little impact on reducing this delay time. OBJECTIVES: To identify symptoms expected by a patient during a myocardial infarction and to examine whether a discrepancy between expectations and experience influenced delay in seeking treatment. METHODS: A retrospective, descriptive design was used. The setting was a large northeastern medical center. The convenience sample included 65 patients (mean age, 57; 74% men) after their first myocardial infarction. Data were collected with the Symptom Representation Questionnaire, a semi-structured interview guide that identified subjects' expectations about heart disease, actual symptom experience, and strategies used to manage the experience. RESULTS: The majority of subjects reported that they had expectations about the symptoms of heart disease that focused on location, intensity, associated symptoms, and quality. Expectations did not match the symptom experience of 74% of subjects. Subjects whose expectations did not match their experience delayed significantly longer before seeking treatment than subjects whose expectations did match their experience. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicated that patients have expectations about symptoms of heart disease that may influence their behavior during a myocardial infarction.

Consensus among nurse scholars has not been reached regarding suitable qualities for accepting or rejecting the evidence arising from various world views. The authors' purpose in writing the paper is to describe the qualities or warrants for evaluating scientific findings (the 'evidence') of different research perspectives. The warrantable evidence pertinent to post-positivist, interpretivist, critical social theorist, and feminist perspectives are described and common warrants are suggested. Three warrants common to these scientific perspectives are proposed: (a) scrutiny and critique of methodological rigor and findings by the scientific community; (b) corroboration and intersubjectivity; and (c) scope of the evidence. The identification of common warrantable evidence will assist nurses in developing some core values regarding the constituents of good science or good scholarship even in the face of pluralism in nursing science approaches.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract