Studies in graduateness and compassion

: analysing their relationship, influence and development in nursing and social work

Abstract

This thesis comprises three principal elements. The first is a research methods element which was awarded Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL - see Appendix 1). The School of Education and Social Work examined my academic transcript from my masters’ course and determined RPL could be awarded.

The compulsory structured literature review, therefore, is the first element in this thesis. I chose to undertake a systematised review, exploring the concept of graduateness, with a focus on United Kingdom (UK) nursing. This review has within it an additional tier of method, as it contains a concept analysis of graduateness, using a modified version of Walker and Avant’s concept analysis model (1995) and from this a model of graduateness in UK nursing was constructed from the literature. The overall structure was derived from the work of McDonald Ross (2010) and the nursing-specific attribute clusters from Lyte (2007). The remainder of the content populating the model is drawn from the literature accessed for the review. Decisionmaking around the nature of the review, the methods used, modifications made, and the model’s construction are all detailed. This work was presented and accepted at upgrade review in August 2016.

In the empirical phase, it is expected that the focus articulates with literature review. I selected compassion from my graduateness model and explored this as a graduate attribute by examining the nature of compassion generally, before concentrating on its education and learning aspects in nursing and social work. I employed a critical discourse analysis methodology in this study and considered compassion in the two fields, from both UK and Scottish focus in the literature analysis and focus groups, respectively. Focus groups were conducted locally, with near-to qualifying students of nursing and social work and newly qualified practitioners of both professions to sustain the new graduate interest in compassion.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Dundee
Supervisor	Tim Kelly (Supervisor) & Caroline Bradbury-Jones (Supervisor)