Nursing Theory Development

1. Why is there a course on theory development and analysis?
The PhD in Nursing Science students are expected to be independent thinkers with demonstrated abilities to articulate, investigate, analyze and interpret on original research in order to contribute to generate knowledge in nursing science. Throughout a course on theory development and analysis can build a solid foundation for research to guide PhD students in the entire process of research studies, including understanding a particular phenomenon, offering general methodology and guiding how to collect and analyze data.
Moreover, a course on theory development and analysis not only guides PhD students in research, but also improves the problem solving ability in various situations.
Based on the context of theoretical framework, a researcher can understand the understand variables and concepts in a particular study, provide a general methodology and guides a researcher to collect, analyze data. However, in some cases, only one theory cannot offer an appropriate rationale of his/her research problem because a theory is applicable in a particular domain. Therefore, a researcher may synthesize some existing theories and empirical findings in the literature concerning the research questions to formulate a conceptual framework to guide his/her research. In other words, a conceptual framework is a synthesis of both theoretical and empirical findings from many resources. For example, when a research would like to investigate caring in nursing practices, a researcher can either choose a particular caring theory to develop a theoretical framework, or integrate various caring theories and literature to formulate a conceptual framework depended on his/her research problem. Moreover, compared with a theoretical framework, a conceptual framework tends to have limited scope that a research would like to investigate. For instance, the UCSF Symptom Management Theory (SMT) is a deductive, middle range theory depicting symptom management as a dynamic process in the domains of nursing science. SMT has a broad scope of application in various adult disease, such as cancer, cardiac disease and HIV. Further, when a researcher employs SMT to develop the conceptual framework to investigate symptom management in cardiac surgical patents, a researcher needs to specify the variables that he/she would like to explore, i.e., he/she can presents the variable “symptom” as “fatigue” in the conceptual