Standards to assure quality in nursing research.

The focus of this article is quality assurance in nursing research. Due to well established problems regarding the education of nursing research and increasing pressure to take responsibility for the quality of all educational activities, departments of nursing are obliged to initiate actions to assure quality in nursing research. A nursing department functions within a well-defined external context. The external context comprises of various aspects such as role player expectations and current educational and professional legislation. Standards are the basic components of any quality assurance system (Booyens, 1996:305). Standards give direction to the practitioner and must be compiled within the context of the country's cultural, philosophical and ethical value systems, as well as its social economic and political development. The premise of the study was that if the education of nursing research, indeed the total management of nursing research within the department, is subjected to quality assurance, the outcome of the in terms of nursing research will be positive. The research objective addressed in the study was to formulate and validate standards against which quality in nursing research in a nursing department can be judged. Muller's phases of standard formulation were used as the methodological basis for the study. Optimal, specific standards were formulated using a deductive process and validated by implementing the standards in a department of nursing.

Role-player expectations regarding the education of nursing research.

This article reports on role player expectations regarding the education of nursing research. The importance of the role player expectations are two-fold: firstly as a factor in the external environment influencing and guiding the formulation phase of the development of standards and secondly, due to the clear indications of problems regarding nursing research in the nursing profession in literature. The role player expectations were elicited using a qualitative, exploratory and contextual design. The role player population included nurse educators, nurses in managerial, clinical and research positions, students and the medical profession. The data was gathered using the naïve sketches and qualitative data analysis was done using Morse & Field's approach (1996:103-107) in combination with Tesch's data analysis approach as cited by Creswell (1994:154-156). Sixty initial categories were narrowed down to six final categories, which are the research learning programme, personnel, students, departmental policies, funding and support systems. The role player expectations were elicited as part of a research study aiming tot develop a self-evaluation system for quality assurance in nursing research and as such, the role player expectations plays a pivotal role in the development of standards for the self-evaluation system.