Research Paradigms and Methods for Investigating Holistic Nursing Concerns

Key Issues in Clinical and Epidemiological Research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine – a Systematic Literature Review

“…This can help to establish a patient-centred mechanistic understanding of the intervention and its impact, irrespective of whether mechanisms and objective outcomes of treatments are known [16,26,56,[97][98][99][100]. Qualitative research is unsuitable when trying to establish causal relationships or specific physiological outcomes [101], but is relevant for the investigation of changes in subjective approaches to health and illness [5].…”

“…In relation to studies of outcomes of specific therapies, qualitative research may be used to assess the subjective views of individuals [14,8,25,26,44,97,98]. This can help to establish a patient-centred mechanistic understanding of the intervention and its impact, irrespective of whether mechanisms and objective outcomes of treatments are known [16,26,56,[97][98][99][100].…”

“…However, rigour and sophistication of case reports could be improved [10,67,106]. There was a strong consensus that both qualitative and quantitative methods are valuable and should be combined in the CAM research agenda, e.g., qualitative methods to formulate hypothesis on mechanisms (which might be tested by quantitative methods) as well as in specific clinical studies, e.g., to assess reasons for dropouts, identification of the most relevant outcomes or to generally improve interventions [2,14,16,18,22,25,26,28,42,71,98,100,102,[107][108][109][110]. The use of qualitative methods has been particularly discussed as a preliminary basis for preparation of clinical trials [25,28,29,79,97,101].…”

“…Various criteria were proposed for deciding on the priorities of future CAM research in general, such as prevalence of use and burden of disease [7,8,29,45,46,81,82,92,107,[123][124][125][126], and also for specific fields and modalities of CAM [76,78,114,123,127,128], where priorities might differ [129]. The context, foundations and philosophical background of CAM treatments [13,26,28,57,58,71,76,97,99,119,121,[130][131][132] are an important basis through which to understand the differences between CAM practices and conventional medicine. The safety of different CAM treatments needs to be assessed [46,57,58,64,82,89,91,119,133] to protect patients using CAM [46], even though CAM is generally considered safe [55,81].…”

Caring needs in patient-partner dyads affected by heart failure: An evaluation of the long-term effects of a dyadic psycho-educational intervention

“…By combining different quantitative and qualitative methods, a richer and more in-depth description of dyads' caring needs could be described [103,104].…”