An Analysis of the Concepts in Child Health Nursing Studies in Korea(1): from 1990 to 2000

국내 아동간호학 분야의 연구개념 고찰- 최근 10년 간 연구논문을 중심으로 -

The main purpose of this study is to examine the concepts appeared on researches and provide the future research directions in field of child health nursing. A descriptive study was conducted. 205 studies were included in an analysis the concepts in terms of the domain of client for a total 321 researches. All were originally published between 1990 and 2000 in Korea. An analysis of concepts for this study was used the metaparadigm framework for nursing proposed by H.S. Kim(2000). The concepts for this study were categorized by essentialistic concepts, problematic concepts, health-care experiential concepts with the following results. 1. Based on the four domains suggested Kim (2000), 205 studies(63.9％) belong to the domain of client ; 109 studies(34％) belong to the practice domain of nursing; 3 studies(0.9％) belong to the client-nurse domain; and 4 studies belong to the domain of environment, respectively. 2. In the domain of client, 117(57.1％) studies used concept of parent. Among them, mother was the prevailing research population(103 studies). 64 studies(31.2％) used child population and the developmental stage of children varied from preterm to puberty but school aged children was the most target population(28 studies). Family as a concept of client was used in 20 studies(9.8％) but most primary care provider was the mother. 3. In terms of research design, non-experimental design(83.5％) is the most and among them survey was 159 studies(77.6％). Qualitative research(23 studies) and experimental research(10 studies) methods were used relatively few. 4. In terms of the categories of concepts, 196 (61.4％) studies included the essentialistic concepts like stress and coping(20.4％), mothering role and child care(7.8％), health (5.6％), breast feeding(4.7％). 31 studies included problematic concepts like power-lessness, safety, obesity, pain, anxiety. And 65 studies included health-care experiential concepts like compliance, growth, hope, environment but relatively few. The findings of this study provide the evidence that research related problematic concept and health-care experiential concept should be conducted actively to improve the practice of child health nursing. Also to deeply understand the phenomena of client in field of child health nursing, interpretive research methods should be conducted actively, too.