Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
The Methodology
Due to the fact that so many people were involved in the
development of the new Bachelor of Nursing programme, it was
decided to use a narrative analysis as the research design. By
doing so the stakeholders, had the opportunity to tell their “stories”
about their experiences in the process of developing the new
curriculum (Polit & Beck, 2004:260).
The following research question was developed:
“How did the stakeholders experience the collaboration
process with the Department at MIT while participating in the
development of the BN curriculum?”
To answer the research question, the following aims were
developed:
1. Describing the experiences of the different stakeholders in
participating in the curriculum development process.
2. Determining the satisfaction of the stakeholders with regards
to their contribution in developing the new curriculum.
3. Determining how the stakeholders valued their own
participation with the view of involving them in future
curriculum development processes.
Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with the
stakeholders involved in developing the new BN-curriculum. These
took place between the end of July and Mid-August, and included a
focus group interview with the teaching staff who participated in
developing the new curriculum.
All the interviews were tape-recorded with the consent of the
stakeholders, and transcribed verbatim afterwards.
Data analysis was done using Mayring’s content analysis approach
(Mayring & Glaeser-Zikuda, 2005: 9-11), because it enabled the
researchers to break the content of the interviews down into
manageable units that could later be analysed and classified into
categories.
The Findings
The researchers used the approach of simultaneous interviewing
and analysis. This meant that the analysis was happening
throughout the data collection phase. On completion of this
process, the data revealed 6 main categories. These were:
1. Existing Programme
2. The need to change
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