Being reflexive in research and clinical practice: a practical example
Intended for healthcare professionals
Evidence and practice    

Being reflexive in research and clinical practice: a practical example

Wendy English Doctoral candidate, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Merryn Gott Professor, Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Jackie Robinson Senior lecturer, Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Why you should read this article:
  • To inspire nurses to be more reflexive as researchers and practitioners

  • To provide an example of reflexivity at the interface of research and nursing practice

  • To consider learning more about reflexivity as an approach to developing nursing knowledge

Background Reflexivity is an invaluable skill for nurses and researchers, as it assists in closing the gap between research and practice and improves nursing practice. However, there is some doubt about how well reflexivity is implemented in nursing. There has also been little published showing how reflexivity can be applied in research and nursing.

Aim To provide an example of reflexivity in research to demonstrate that knowledge and experiences are transferable to nursing practice.

Discussion Reflexivity is an important tool for research and nursing in finding the meeting points or interface of research and practice. This article provides an example of being reflexive that identified how the research skills of ‘listening to understand’ and ‘finding meaning’ filtered into nursing practice.

Conclusion Reflexivity helped to generate knowledge about research skills filtering across a research project into clinical practice. Being reflexive as a researcher and a nurse can transform the care of patients and families.

Implications for practice This article provides an example of how reflexivity can be applied to research and nursing practice. It also suggests reframing the gap between research and practice as an interface between the two. This could encourage nurses to think of research skills and knowledge as transferable into real-time nursing practice.

Nurse Researcher. doi: 10.7748/nr.2022.e1833

Peer review

This article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software

Correspondence

weng888@aucklanduni.ac.nz

Conflict of interest

None declared

English W, Gott M, Robinson J (2022) Being reflexive in research and clinical practice: a practical example. Nurse Researcher. doi: 10.7748/nr.2022.e1833

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for perceiving the ‘Listening to understand’ concept from an earlier draft

Published online: 01 June 2022

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