Who started this and why?

Three of us were sitting in Copenhagen airport on the way back from a scientific meeting in Lithuania in January 2009. We were swapping stories about how much time we had spent on research bids that had not gone anywhere and we thought about an starting an initiative that would serve a useful purpose but that we had more control over its outcome than a grant application. We decided on a series of meetings.

I went back to work the next week and drew my colleague Danny Kelly into the planning. Eventually we plumped for a topic around the role and usefulness of the social sciences in healthcare and nursing research, which was something that we all felt strongly about. We felt that one key strength of nursing research is its eccelcticism (that is appropriate for the complexity of the healthcare setting and issues around professional work) but that there was a danger that this would gradually disappear in the face of a broadly biomedical model of research being seen as the single goal and norm for nursing research.

Here we are:

Michael Traynor

I work at Middlesex University in London. My staff page is here and a personal website is here.

Danny Kelly

My first degree was in Social Sciences at Edinburgh. This interest has stayed with me and I ventured back into Sociology to undertake a PhD at Goldsmiths in the late 1990's. My clinical interests include cancer and palliative care; a context shaped by a unique melding of the social, scientific, political, moral, emotional and personal.

Pam Smith

Helen Allan

I am a nurse researcher working at the University of Surrey in the Centre for Research in Nursing and Midwifery Education funded by the General Nursing Council and the High Coombe trusts. Here's a link to my univesity webpage.

I've just noticed that the journal Nursing Research published an article in October 1956 on the social sciences in nursing. Dr Dorrian Apple was conducting an experiment that involved putting a social scientist into a school of nursing to 'see what happens'. Click here for the link. The topics and benefits that Dr Apple was looking for are similar to ours, for example to give a conceptual frameworks to nurses in order to help find meaning within their observations. Dr Apple asked, for example, 'If I wish to change some unsanctioned practice that has grown up in an organisation, what benefits to the participants will I be disrupting?'