Nursing Inquiry 2014; 21(4): 269
Editorial
Tribute to a nursing inquiry giant DOI: 10.1111/nin.12086
It is difficult these days to find a nurse with any inclination toward qualitative methods who has not relied upon the virtual mentorship of Margarete Sandelowski. Sandelowski’s classic papers have been required reading in most of our qualitative methods graduate courses for three decades, and her extensive body of critical commentary on various methodological worries and complexities over the years has done much to guide our discipline toward rigorous, coherent, theoretically sound and clinically meaningful qualitative scholarship. Nursing has firmly established itself as a leader within the qualitative health methodological universe, not only because of its abiding enthusiasm for subjective, experiential and even metaphysical matters, but also because scholars like Sandelowski have exerted a constant and tenacious pressure upon nurses to think deeply and critically about what we say and do in the name of our qualitative disciplinary enterprises. Sandelowski’s fascination for pattern is prominent across her body of published work. Drawing on an extensive transdisciplinary reading knowledge, she experiments with how new insights about how shape, structure and texture might apply to the world of human health and illness research, inviting us into a visceral relationship with contexts and conditions through her imaginative and adroit use of language. Her writing also urges us to think. When she realized that an early paper on the problem of rigor in qualitative research was being cited far too frequently as an authority on methodological correctitude, she published a counter argument on quality measures, provocatively subtitled ‘rigor or rigor mortis?’ Over the years, her writings have tackled such thorny issues as the manner in which we navigate truth claims, the role of numbers in qualitative analysis, and how perspective and metaphor can enhance or detract from a qualitatively derived product. She has prodded her colleagues in the field to take a serious approach to their scholarly writing, modelling and encouraging elegance, artfulness and even playfulness in the language signifiers with which we attempt to
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
convey nuanced meanings. And at a time when we seemed to be collectively slipping into a tolerance for publishing underdeveloped qualitative analytic products, she chastised us with a treatise on ‘words that should be seen but not written’. In recent years, she has focused much of her methodological attention on new frontiers in research synthesis, helping us think through the intellectual quagmire of what it means to integrate dissimilarly constructed knowledge claims into usefully coherent conceptualizations. This year has marked her formal retirement from academic life, although not from the world of ideas. As such, it seems fitting to acknowledge the tiny but deep footprint Sandelowski has made upon the scholarly landscape of the nursing discipline, as well as on this journal. A founding member of Nursing Inquiry’s International Advisory Board, she guided numerous prospective authors with her pithy and incisive but characteristically gracious reviews. Her most recent Nursing Inquiry paper (now on Early View, but to be formally published in a subsequent issue) reflects fresh perspectives on methodological quality derived from her recent readings about the intricacies of the wine industry. In it, she invites us into a world in which ‘taste’ bridges objectivity and subjectivity – an attribute clearly applicable to the development of a sophisticated quality analysis for qualitatively derived knowledge products. Now that she has carved out the kind of time that might allow her to sip that wine in a leisurely manner as she contemplates the universe, there is no telling what fascinating new intellectual alignments will ensue. And we, her reading audience, will be eagerly awaiting them. Unquestionably, Margarete Sandelowksi is one of those giants upon whose shoulders the discipline’s scholarly aspirations have established a truly solid perch. Sally Thorne Editor-in-Chief Nursing Inquiry
Copyright of Nursing Inquiry is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Editorial
Tribute to a nursing inquiry giant DOI: 10.1111/nin.12086
It is difficult these days to find a nurse with any inclination toward qualitative methods who has not relied upon the virtual mentorship of Margarete Sandelowski. Sandelowski’s classic papers have been required reading in most of our qualitative methods graduate courses for three decades, and her extensive body of critical commentary on various methodological worries and complexities over the years has done much to guide our discipline toward rigorous, coherent, theoretically sound and clinically meaningful qualitative scholarship. Nursing has firmly established itself as a leader within the qualitative health methodological universe, not only because of its abiding enthusiasm for subjective, experiential and even metaphysical matters, but also because scholars like Sandelowski have exerted a constant and tenacious pressure upon nurses to think deeply and critically about what we say and do in the name of our qualitative disciplinary enterprises. Sandelowski’s fascination for pattern is prominent across her body of published work. Drawing on an extensive transdisciplinary reading knowledge, she experiments with how new insights about how shape, structure and texture might apply to the world of human health and illness research, inviting us into a visceral relationship with contexts and conditions through her imaginative and adroit use of language. Her writing also urges us to think. When she realized that an early paper on the problem of rigor in qualitative research was being cited far too frequently as an authority on methodological correctitude, she published a counter argument on quality measures, provocatively subtitled ‘rigor or rigor mortis?’ Over the years, her writings have tackled such thorny issues as the manner in which we navigate truth claims, the role of numbers in qualitative analysis, and how perspective and metaphor can enhance or detract from a qualitatively derived product. She has prodded her colleagues in the field to take a serious approach to their scholarly writing, modelling and encouraging elegance, artfulness and even playfulness in the language signifiers with which we attempt to
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
convey nuanced meanings. And at a time when we seemed to be collectively slipping into a tolerance for publishing underdeveloped qualitative analytic products, she chastised us with a treatise on ‘words that should be seen but not written’. In recent years, she has focused much of her methodological attention on new frontiers in research synthesis, helping us think through the intellectual quagmire of what it means to integrate dissimilarly constructed knowledge claims into usefully coherent conceptualizations. This year has marked her formal retirement from academic life, although not from the world of ideas. As such, it seems fitting to acknowledge the tiny but deep footprint Sandelowski has made upon the scholarly landscape of the nursing discipline, as well as on this journal. A founding member of Nursing Inquiry’s International Advisory Board, she guided numerous prospective authors with her pithy and incisive but characteristically gracious reviews. Her most recent Nursing Inquiry paper (now on Early View, but to be formally published in a subsequent issue) reflects fresh perspectives on methodological quality derived from her recent readings about the intricacies of the wine industry. In it, she invites us into a world in which ‘taste’ bridges objectivity and subjectivity – an attribute clearly applicable to the development of a sophisticated quality analysis for qualitatively derived knowledge products. Now that she has carved out the kind of time that might allow her to sip that wine in a leisurely manner as she contemplates the universe, there is no telling what fascinating new intellectual alignments will ensue. And we, her reading audience, will be eagerly awaiting them. Unquestionably, Margarete Sandelowksi is one of those giants upon whose shoulders the discipline’s scholarly aspirations have established a truly solid perch. Sally Thorne Editor-in-Chief Nursing Inquiry
Copyright of Nursing Inquiry is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
