This chapter presents an overview of the state of the art ethnographies conducted by nurses and highlights a few works by the early generation. An extensive search of the literature was conducted to identify ethnographies completed by nurses. Nursing knowledge was a common thread throughout the literature reviewed. The literature review revealed the progress nursing is making in recognizing this gap and attempting to close it. Nursing knowledge is essential in patient care. Using the ethnographic method of inquiry, nurses have been able to identify areas of need both in knowledge and practice and make recommendations for enhanced practice. Caring and patient advocacy were other common themes in the literature. Caring is the essence of nursing and consequently should be incorporated in nursing research. The common purpose of the ethnographic studies reviewed was to explain or understand a phenomenon to increase nursing knowledge.

This chapter explores how a love researcher goes from having a conception or even a theory of love to actually constructing a love scale. A love scale provides a way to test the validity of a theory. A love scale enables couples to assess one aspect of their compatibility. A love scale provides individuals and couples an opportunity to enhance their love relationships. The one important thing to remember is that as measuring instruments love scales are far from perfect. Love scales are no different from scales for measuring intelligence or personality. An investigator might simultaneously measure intimacy with the intimacy subscale of the Triangular Love Scale and observe a couple in interaction, looking for behaviors signifying trust, caring, compassion, and communication. No scientist today believes that it is possible to capture the entire phenomenon of love through scientific study or through scales that are geared to measure love.

The purpose of the orienting to present reality (OPR) exercise is to help clients with a dissociative disorder, or help dissociative symptoms work with their ego state system to begin to experience present time and place. This generally enhances feelings of reality and security for the system as well as their sense of appropriate caring and protection by the adult client. The OPR Protocol is done in three steps: getting to know the ego state(s), using the workplace, and comparison between the present and the past. Generally, OPR will need to be repeated many times during treatment, since parts may appear who need orientation or reorientation during any phase in the therapy. This includes times during eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) trauma processing when a disoriented part(s) may appear.

The use of nursing theories helps to better define the focus of the CARES tool and to establish the intent for the tool’s usage. Two nursing theories helped to guide the development of the CARES tool and provided the desired focus on communication and hope that the CARES tool was designed to emphasize. The developmental phenomenon of self-transcendence is essential for the maintenance of mental health at the end of life. The dying must identify that they are so much more than their disease. Evidence-based symptom management must be provided for individuals to focus their energies on achieving this meaning and to strive for self-transcendence. There are five common caring processes or features to this theory that identify components of a caring relationship. The five components are maintaining belief, knowing, being with, doing for, and enabling.

This chapter provides an overview of the experience of caregivers, and interventions that can be implemented at various points throughout the trajectory of the illness. Caregivers are often called upon to understand complex medication regimens, contact 'hard to reach' medical providers, navigate a difficult health and legal system, advocate for services, negotiate with insurance companies, and/or manage the household, finances, and children. The needs of caregivers are often overlooked by healthcare providers, friends, and family members in the face of the complex needs of the person with cancer. A growing number of psychosocial interventions have been developed specifically to address the psychosocial burden on caregivers. However, as each caregiver and care situation is unique, interventions need to be tailored depending on the patient's medical condition, emotional and physical needs, and required medical/nursing tasks.

The author, Jean Watson, began to recognize that people could never know the subjective inner life world of others, but can be open to connecting human-to-human with others, realizing that one person’s level of humanity reflects on us all. Her journey as an ‘identified leader’ in nursing has taken her, and continues to take her, into the heart of nursing the soul of nursing, the sacred dimensions of nursing to be more specific. In summary, her so-called leadership has evolved from within, leading by following her inner passion, heart-centered vision, and ethical ideals of acknowledging and honoring that nurses hold a moral covenant with humanity to sustain human caring, health, and wholeness with dignity and informed moral compassion. The human sacred dimension of nursing is the bedrock and the moral motivation, which sets the value’s frame and serves as the moral map, vision, guide, and prophetic mentor into our future.

The author, Mary Rockwood Lane, discovered that her life as a woman, nurse, artist, activist, and writer was her destiny and spiritual journey. It all seemed to come together on a single day, when she felt a profound inner shift that revealed her true essence; the day that made her realize why she became a nurse in the first place. Lane’s research study showed that creativity helped patients find love and compassion. The research revealed themes that creativity helped patients get in touch with their inner wisdom, with their soul or spirit. Lane believed in caring and forgiveness. She began to understand why caring was actually the choice for peace and war was not. Our ability to live in peace comes from our authenticity as human beings. Peace is the cornerstone of wholeness and health and Caritas is an ethical and philosophical foundation for creating peace.

The author, A. Lynne Wagner, has always envisioned nurses needing an expansive knowledge of body and disease, of clinical skills and machinery, and perhaps team skills of working together in a crisis. Wagner began her journey in exploring the power of reflective inquiry via story and aesthetic expression to inform self and others through three avenues that fostered deeper meaning of nursing: Nurse-Self as Artist; Practicing Nurse as Artist; and Nurse-Researcher as Artist. A typology of three modes of reflection-cognitive, affective, and collective- used to explore caring-self in nursing practice emerged from the data, describing different activities, processes, and outcomes of reflective storytelling that lead to a fuller understanding of experiences. Wagner came to nursing with a strong moral, ethical foundation of caring for others, with a sense of respect and compassion that was fostered by her caregivers, role models, mentors, and growing spirituality throughout her life.

The author, Tilda Shalof, has been a nurse for 33 years, the past 28 of them in the medical-surgical intensive care unit (ICU) at Toronto General Hospital. She have also been a nurse actor for doctors’ practical examinations, an insurance nurse, a flu shot nurse, a traveling nurse, a school nurse, a nurse artist, a nurse writer, and a camp nurse, and now she is a nurse working in a clinic that cares for people living with HIV. In the ICU, patients are unstable, most are unconscious, and all have catastrophic, multisystem, life-threatening illnesses. One surefire way to keep patients safe is for nurses to be vocal, brave, smart, and empowered-and for there to be enough of them. Shalof spent time with nurses caring for soldiers with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and others who care for homeless, pregnant, often drug-addicted young women, and sex workers.

In nursing, a healing relationship between patient and nurse also requires something of a leap of faith that mutual reciprocity is at work because immediate feedback is often unavailable (other than applause), as with the unconscious patient, for example, or with an audience that is difficult for the performer to read. Opportunities for nurses to reconsider the value of music and poetry in their caring/healing practices can be found in the foregoing concepts of allowing for nonimmediate, and sometimes nonexistent, feedback to care interventions. There is likely an abundance of experience in music and poetry that nurses and their caring colleagues can enjoy, as much for its personal value as that of its therapeutic value for patients and their families. Such appreciation also seems to require a certain level of courage and spontaneity to transform the value of music and poetry into caring and healing.