ABSTRACT
The ethnonursing method was developed by the renowned nursing scholar, Dr. Madeleine Leininger. Ethnonursing was the first open inquiry discovery method designed for nurse researchers to study and advance nursing phenomena from a human science philosophical perspective and through the qualitative analytical lens of culture and care (Leininger, 1978, 1985, 1990, 1991, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Leininger & McFarland, 2002, 2006). The method was presented in the Culture Care Diversity and Universality: A Worldwide Theory of Nursing (Culture Care Theory) (CCT) (Leininger & McFarland, 2006) to study the nursing dimensions of culture care that include care phenomena, research enablers, and the social structural factors (e.g., kinship and social; cultural values, beliefs, and lifeways; religious and philosophical; economic; educational; political/legal systems; technological; and environmental context, language, and ethnohistory), and three modes of care action and decision (Leininger & McFarland, 2002, p. 78). As a human care scientist and educator, the first nurse-anthropologist, and qualitative nursing ethnographer, Leininger created new insights into the nature of culture, care, and transcultural nursing by presenting ways to describe, interpret, discover, and understand the diverse meanings and patterns of health and illness, care and healing, survival, and ways of facing and understanding death or disability by diverse cultural groups. Leininger created this new ethnonursing method through her innovative spirit, and her vast knowledge of human beings and nursing, human care, cultural theories, ethnography, ethnoscience, and other field research methods that are used primarily in the discipline of anthropology. What is distinct about Leininger’s ethnonursing method is the emphasis on the patterns of phenomena of interest to nursing, including care, health, culture, and environmental context. She initiated a systematic way to generate knowledge (patterns and themes) of culture care by studying the lifeways and cultural patterns of human beings and care phenomena within their environmental context including the nurse-patient or researcher-informant care relationship. The method provides a way to discover how specifically Leininger’s transcultural theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality (CCT) with its culture care modes could be applied and analyzed in research with the goal of providing culturally congruent care to people of similar and diverse cultures (Leininger, 1990, 1991, 2002, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Leininger & McFarland, 2002, 2006). Moreover, the ethnonursing method facilitated opportunities for the discovery of new transcultural nursing
methods such as the meta-ethnonursing method of McFarland, Wehbe-Alamah, Wilson, and Vossos (2011).
