Involving clinical nurses in qualitative data analysis – using collaborative analysis in nursing research

Background
Nursing as a profession covers many and very diverse practices and roles. Incorporating perspectives from these diverse practices and roles in nursing research is essential, to bridge the theory-practice gap and produce research that is applicable and recognizable to practice as well as education and academia. The collaborative research network Nursing of the Future seeks to develop a coherent knowledge base for nursing in the 21st century. To reach that goal co-research and co–creation were chosen as a methodological fundament and applied in all the networks sub studies. In this study collaborative data analysis (CDA) was used by including clinical nurses in the analysis of group interviews. The purpose was to strengthen the data analysis by including their perspectives, skills and knowledge.

Objective
The aims of this study were to (i) explore CDA as a method in nursing research with the objective of including multiple perspectives and thus potentially gaining a more comprehensive understanding and more recognizable results, (ii) to work out a practical way to apply CDA considering the time constrains of clinical practice and (iii) to evaluate the outcome of using CDA in the research process

Method
Two clinical nurses were invited to partake in analyzing summarized findings from three group interviews in which they themselves were participants, at a CDA workshop along with the first and second authors of this article.

Findings
There are many methodological aspects to consider when using CDA in nursing research, especially concerning “insiderness”. our approach of inviting clinical nurses who were also participants in group interviews to a CDA workshop and presenting summarized findings for further analysis was beneficial and easy applicable. The nurses were proficient to partake and ultimately we identified four outcomes of using our CDA approach; validation and feedback of initial findings produced by researchers, depth and nuance in the analysis, clinical implication of the findings and researchers learn and their understanding grows of both data and practice.

Conclusion
CDA has potential to strengthen and diversify nursing research by involving nurses from different contexts and across different roles bringing their unique perspectives and knowledge of nursing into the analytical process thus leading to more nuanced findings.

Keywords: Co-research, collaborative data analysis, methodology, nursing research, qualitative studies, nursing science, co-creation.