Turning the gaze into something that can be seen, handled and explored: an experimental approach to understanding the nursing gaze through the utterances and emotional prosody of expert and novice nurses

Abstract

Articulating what nursing is and what nurses do, has been a challenge since the creation of the profession. This research draws on technology to solve the issue of revealing and investigating the tacit nature of nursing through the concept of the nursing gaze.

Drawing on the visual attention of nurses, this two-phase experiment identified that the nursing gaze is complex but can be identified with eye tracking and verbal utterances. Both phases of the study utilised videos of simulated nursing practice that acted as the stimulus for viewing.

The practical challenges of tracking eye movement and verbal utterances when stimulus is video was identified and led to the development of Gaze-to-Text to solve these. This novel method drew on ethnographic techniques to combine both eye movement and verbal utterances of novice identifying the tacit nature of the gaze. Concurrent eye tracking and recording of the viewers ‘think aloud’ commentaries led to the identification of eight verbal performative signifiers used by nurses to judge the behaviour and actions. Analysis of both novice and expert nurse’s eye movement demonstrated areas of convergence and divergence and when combined with the verbal utterances, allowed conclusions to be drawn about the cognitive and perceptive processes involved in the nursing gaze.

The findings of the study have implications for developing novice nurses through the articulation of expert nurses gaze. The method of Gaze-to-text offers potential for understanding visual attention and the tacit elements of professionals in other fields.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Weal: orcid.org/0000-0001-6251-8786

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