Research Methodology Overview

Our research began with a question: what do university students encounter of nursing in popular culture, and how do these encounters inform the way these students write about related subjects and in related genres? We both taught at four-year universities: James at Furman University, a liberal arts institution that emphasizes engaged learning, and Sandra at Valdosta State University, a regional university with a College of Nursing that offers bachelor's and master's degrees. We did not, however, want to conduct a study that could only be useful to similar institutions, given the diversity evident in contemporary nursing education. In our literature review, we encountered strong research that emphasized students' intellectual development in both two-year and four-year contexts, so we directed our focus to the first two years of postsecondary education, hoping to target that broader population. Next we accessed curricula from two-year and four-year nursing programs around the United States, and we learned that almost all of these programs require some form of English composition. Given our interest in thinking about the relationship of images of nursing in popular culture and writing excellence, we decided that students in first-year writing classes would be the best population for our research. Since James taught English composition at Furman, among other classes, it made sense for us to choose that university's classes to consider.

We designed a questionnaire, and we administered it to five classes of writing students in the fall of 1999, a total of 80 students. 67 of the questionnaires were completed and returned. James was a participant-observer in two of the five classes, and he used interviews with the professors and some students in the other three classes to gain a sense of their teaching and learning cultures. In general, we wanted our questionnaire to provide informative descriptions of students' interactions with images of nursing, not quantifiable measures of such interactions, though we do present some tabulated results in this webtext. Beyond asking for demographic information from respondents, we focused on four areas of popular culture: television, movies, fiction, and the Internet. Under two of the headers, "Television" and "Movies," we provided a list of options for students to check if appropriate and a series of short-response questions. All other sections included only short-response questions.

Before beginning to outline student respondents' perspectives, however, it's useful to say more about the students' demographics. In our questionnaire, we asked for four categories of information: "age," "gender," "ethnicity," and "occupation." What we quickly learned, though, was that "occupation" was a moot category for the Furman population; respondents were without exception full-time students. In terms of age, students ranged from 18 to 21 years old, with many being either 18 or 19; however, approximately one-fourth of the respondents were 20 or 21, suggesting that they might be repeating the course. Forty of the respondents were female, while 27 were male, a result that matches with Furman's institutional gender distribution very closely. (Furman's Fall 1999 enrollment survey, for instance, suggests that of 1830 full-time and part-time undergraduate degree-seeking students, 1556 were female, and 1284 were male ("Common" online). The final demographic shows that 53 respondents were White, while 11 were African American and 3 were Asian or Asian American.

In this writing, we are carefully referring to our instrument as a questionnaire, not a survey, as we know survey research brings with it a tradition of quantitative rigor that does not match well with what we chose to do. Many survey researchers do detailed coding of their materials, for instance, often forming assessment teams to establish inter-rater reliability. Instead of such overtly formal work, we relied on reading and re-reading the student responses to gain a sense of common themes and perspectives, and we relied on our interactions with each other about the responses to help shape the way we now understand them. We do not, however, believe our approach was any less rigorous. In our view, research results are subjective; thus the heart of inquiry is interpretation, and in the rest of this article section, we carefully present what we have learned from students' questionnaire responses.