Introduction

The ability to conduct research is becoming an ever important skill. The ultimate purpose of nursing is to provide high-quality patient care. Clinical practice without research is practice based on tradition without validation. Research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of nursing treatment modalities, to determine the impact of nursing care on the health of the patients or to test out theory. Nursing practice is undergoing tremendous changes and challenges. In order to meet social challenges and needs, nursing practice must be research based (Lanuza,1999).

As the context of health care is changing due to the pharmaceutical services and technological advances, nurses and other health care professionals need to be prepared to respond in knowledgeable and practical ways. Research in nursing evolved predominantly when nursing education became a part of higher education and was seeking its own body of knowledge, different from that of medicine. Nursing’s first researchers were being prepared in fields other than nursing and have brought to nursing the various paradigms from those fields (Munhall, 2001).

Scientific research is a systematic and objective attempt to provide answers to certain questions. The purpose of scientific research is to discover and develop an organized body of knowledge. Nursing research refers to the use of systematic, controlled, empirical, and critical investigation in attempting to discover or confirm facts that relate to specific problem or question about the practice of nursing. Nursing research is defined as the application of scientific inquiry to the phenomena of concern to nursing. The systematic investigation of patients and their health experience is the primary concern of nursing (Schotfetdt, 1977).

Characteristics of Research

A scientific research has some characteristics (Singh, 2002)

Importance of nursing research

There are several reasons for conducting research investigations, description of phenomena, exploration, or prediction of occurrence of a specific phenomenon. In nursing the purpose of research are