The impact of clinical encounters on student nurses' ethical caring.

The aim of this study was to get a deeper understanding of student nurses' experiences of personal caring ethics by reflection on caring encounters with patients in clinical practice, ethical caring ideals, ethical problems, and sources for inner strength that give courage to practice good caring. In all, 24 Scandinavian student nurses participated voluntarily in an interview study. The interviews were analyzed within a phenomenological-hermeneutical approach and revealed three themes. The students found themselves in two different states of vulnerability: one in which they were overwhelmed by their vulnerability and began to suffer themselves and the other where their vulnerability became a source of development with focus on the patient. The students' ethical caring ideals served as fixed reference points in their ethical development, but their ideals were at risk of decline. The students reflected on the barriers for performing ethical care and nurtured their ethical ideals by providing ethical care in secret. Caring in secret occurred also when student nurses did not experience a shared ethos.

Semantic analysis according to Peep Koort--a substance-oriented research methodology.

The aim of this article is to describe the hermeneutic semantic analysis created by professor Peep Koort (1920-1977) and to discuss it as a methodology for research within caring science. The methodology is developed with a hermeneutic approach that differs from the traditions of semantic analysis in philosophy or linguistics. The research objects are core concepts and theoretical constructs (originally within the academic discipline of education science, later on within the academic discipline of caring science), focusing deeper understanding of essential meaning content when developing a discipline. The qualitative methodology of hermeneutic semantic analysis is described step by step as created by Koort, interpreted and developed by the authors. An etymological investigation and an analysis of synonymy between related concepts within a conceptual family guides the researcher to understand and discriminate conceptual dimensions of meaning content connected to the word studied, thus giving opportunities to summarise it in a theoretical definition, a discovery that can be tested in varying contexts. From a caring science perspective, we find the hermeneutic methodology of semantic analysis fruitful and suitable for researchers developing their understanding of core concepts and theoretical constructs connected to the development of the academic discipline.