About All Those Paradigms:

Many in the Universe, Two in Nursing

Theres plenty nursing paradigms and worldviews evidence in nursing science to

describe their defining characteristics. Distinguishly only three "worldview" from among
various assertions in the literature: the reaction worldview, the reciprocal interaction
worldview and the simultaneous action worldview. No less than seven examples of
contrasting pairs of scientific traditions discussed in the literature over the past hundred
years, but at least one view that presented on complex nonlinear dynamical system as a
framework for nursing inquiry. The large number of paradigms being touted in the nursing
literature is surprising, intriguing, and a little bit troubling. The older paradigm is generally
characterized as more positivistic, more reductionistic, more objectivistic, more quantitative,
while the newer paradigm is seen as more relativistic, more holistic, more attentive to
subjective phenomena and more qualitative. In 1985, there are two paradigms in nursing,
the totality and the simultaneity, it set forth an argument that has been very influential in
discourse about nursing theory and metathory in the 10 years since. The theoretical
frameworks and practice and research traditions that the paradigms are intended to
encompass, were specific to ways of thinking about the phenomena of concers to nursing
science. The goals of nursing in the totality paradigm are predominantly oriented toward
maintenace and restoration of norms and care is designed in advance by the nurse based
on a skilled assessment. The goals of nursing in the simultaneity paradigm are oriented
toward quality of life and evolving patterns of living for the person and family.

A very large number of diciplines study things human, while a much smaller number
study health while it reveal how the concept of health fits in comment regarding the
squeezing in of themiddle paradigm. It seems to have taken everything human out of the
ultra-conservative reaction or particulare-deterministic paradigm. The emerging structure of
nursing knowledge will leave behind altogether the reductionistic, natural-science model of
nursing. There really are only two sets of essential beliefs about human beings and health in
nursing, it has merely divided the totality perspective into a left wing and right wing and it has
compromised the notion of unitary. For example, the notion that humans are systems that
move through stages of organization and disorganization to more complex organization is
inconsistent with the original meaning of unitary human. In all the discourses of the ages,
across continents and cultures, there have been innumeranle disciplines knowledge
organized in a million different ways in different times and circumtances by different people.
In the natural and social sciences of todays world, there may indeed by many paradigms in
any number of different disciplines. But in nursing, there remain only two.