Analysis and evaluation

Abstract

It was because of this belief that Roper, Logan and Tierney wrote The Elements of Nursing in which their nursing model was first presented. One decade later, theorists and scholars continue to debate these issues. Hanucharurnkul (1989) argues that there is still no single nursing paradigm to direct practice, education or research, but only a range of phenomena related to nursing which may be interpreted in many different ways. Botha (1989) defines a paradigm as a ‘group commitment to a constellation of beliefs which represent a particular way of viewing the world — in this case a discipline’. Flaskerud and Halloran (1980) present four phenomena related to nursing which appear to have been accepted as a paradigm of nursing by other nursing theorists: these are the concepts of man as the recipient of nursing care, health, the environment, and nursing. Fawcett (1989) asserts that these phenomena are central concepts which together constitute a metaparadigm of nursing. She describes a metaparadigm as ‘a global perspective of a discipline’, and quotes the following statement of Donaldson and Crowley (1978) as the major proposition of nursing’s metaparadigm because it clearly emphasises the relationship of the four concepts:

Nursing studies the wholeness or health of humans, recognising that humans are in continuous interaction with their environment.

The complexity and specialisation of nursing today make it more necessary than ever for the elements of nursing to be identified and understood.

(Roper et al. 1980)