INTRODUCTION

For female nursing students in Vietnam, juggling work, school, and personal obligations can be especially difficult. Research on how these students develop resilience while juggling their multiple roles is still lacking, despite the fact that their numbers in nursing school are increasing. This study explores how the work-life-study balance (WLSB) of female students pursuing an Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN) to a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program is shaped by their real-life experiences and sociocultural influences.

A qualitative research design informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used in this study. In September 2024, ten carefully selected female nursing students participated in semi-structured interviews at a private university in Ho Chi Minh City. From October 2024 to February 2025, each 45–60 minute interview was subjected to a thematic analysis using Delve software.

The challenges faced by the participants, along with their support systems, coping strategies, and aspirations, were captured in four key themes, each with its own set of sub-themes. The first theme, Navigating Life's Crossroads: The Struggle for Balance, highlighted the students' struggles to manage competing demands, featuring subthemes, Pulled in All Directions, Time as a Scarce Commodity, and Compromises and Sacrifices. The second theme, Anchors in the Storm: Finding Strength in Support, emphasized the vital role of relational support, showcasing subthemes, Peer Solidarity and Shared Struggles, and Family as a Pillar of Strength. The third theme, Pathways to Resilience: Strategies for Survival, focused on coping strategies and adaptive techniques, incorporating subtheme, Faith and Inner Strength, Embracing the Role of a Working Learner, and Prioritizing and Organizing. Finally, the last theme, Purpose, Aspiration, and Future Orientation, brought attention to the participants' sources of motivation and their optimistic outlook, with subthemes, Motivation Rooted in Family and Self and Hope and Optimism as Sustaining Forces. These findings, grounded in the Transformative Resilience Model, illustrate how students harness their inner drive, familial and social responsibilities, and cultural values to adapt and thrive in the face of challenges. To maintain their dedication to education and uplift their families, participants leaned on hope, spiritual insights, and a sense of agency, viewing their struggles as meaningful experiences.

The experiences of Vietnamese female nursing students reveal a remarkable resilience shaped by both heavy social expectations and personal challenges. Drawing from the Transformative Resilience Model, this study highlights how facing and overcoming adversity can lead to significant identity development and personal growth. Institutional support plays a crucial role in enhancing a student's well-being, which can include flexible academic policies, accessible mental health services, and adaptable work-study options. Financial pressures, job-related stress, and academic demands often contribute to burnout. These findings underscore the urgent need for systemic, collaborative efforts to foster inclusive and sustainable learning environments for nursing students who are balancing work and study.

Human ; Education, Continuing ; Nursing Research

This reflective paper explored the philosophical foundations of lifelong learning and impactful research in the field of nursing. Anchored in personal experience and supported by scholarly literature, it illustrated the transformative power of continuous learning, the cultivation of research competence, and the moral responsibility of contributing meaningfully to society. A nurse researcher's journey is not defined by awards or accomplishment but by an unwavering dedication to knowledge creation, community involvement, and evidence-based practice. The "emptying one's cup" metaphor embodies intellectual humility, a mindset that keeps the mind open to learning, self-improvement, and meaningful service throughout one's career.

The philosophical basis of nursing research is simply about increasing our knowledge and addressing everyday challenges through reflective thinking. This article explored the fundamental principles that inform nursing research and stresses nurse researchers' vital role in meeting everyday challenges. By employing classic philosophical concepts and contemporary ways of knowing, this article explained how individual beliefs, conceptions about truth, and reflections on self had contributed to knowledge development. To put it plainly, this article is about the story of a nurse researcher and the illustration of how a nurse's philosophy impacts research and consequently contributes to the development of nursing science. Instead of regarding this process as a quest for the ultimate truth, this article recognized the evolving process of interacting with fluid knowledge to advance nursing practice and do well in society.

This essay laid out the development of a nurse's identity from clinical practitioner to developing researcher, with a focus on the importance of patient-centered and nurse-centered care as the cornerstone pillars of nursing research. Through narrative and application of qualitative and participatory research approaches, the author showed the intersection of everyday experience, philosophical inquiry, and scholarly pursuit along the path toward becoming a nurse researcher. The article examined how emotional experiences within the perioperative environment have instigated research questions aimed at improving patient and nurse well-being. Through the incorporation of academic models and theoretical perspectives, the author presented an emerging investment in health equity, social determinants of health, and collective inquiry, framing this individual path within the greater nursing science mission.

In this paper, I reflect on caring and witnessing through engaged ethnography of an urban poor community during the onset of the COVID19 pandemic. The urban poor are individuals and families who live below the poverty line in metropolitan areas, many of whom have little or no political voice and are insufficiently protected by social networks and other institutions. In March 2020, the government placed Metro Manila under Enhanced Community Quarantine to control the spread of COVID19. This left many an urban poor community in Metro Manila to struggle even more against an already precarious existence. By standard, nurses render different levels of care for urban poor clients in almost all health care settings. In public health nursing, we come in close contact to the realities of our clients when we see them in health centers, in the community, or whenever we do our home visits. Now, caring for vulnerable and marginalized groups such as the urban poor has changed due to minimum public health standards of wearing masks, physical distancing, handwashing, and enforcement of lockdowns. As a nurse, an academic, and as a student of anthropology, I came up for self-review while doing an article for a popular social news network derived from a virtually engaged ethnography. While this novel method requires you to see the world through the eyes of the “other,” and generates bioethical dialogue and awareness of personal biases in addressing ethical considerations and challenges, it gives voice and fulfills our roles as client advocates. In May 2020, the article was published with the urban poor organization and its partners as my coauthors. I borrowed from anthropology to arrive at a greater understanding of the socio-cultural effects and political implications of COVID19 to one of the most vulnerable nursing clientele – the urban poor.
Public Health Nursing ; Ethics, Research ; COVID-19

PURPOSE: This study aimed to understand the experiences of married North Korean women's child-rearing, working lives, and their home and work environment in depth.METHODS: This study adopted van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenological method to qualitatively analyze data. The participants were 8 married North Korean women defectors. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and observations from July 4 to August 20, 2018.RESULTS: Nine essential themes emerged: more personal challenges after overcoming a life-threatening crisis; hopes of firmly settling in this land; the wound from the north, which chased them here; a body that becomes stronger through hardship; being stuck in a past full of anxiety and pain; the present is full of hope; hope for the future; sense of alienation from coworkers that cannot be overcome; and sense of power to endure an exhausting work life.CONCLUSION: This study provided a broader understanding of the life and experiences of married women from North Korea. It highlights the need for nurses to recognize their importance in nursing care. The study also suggests that academic and practical approaches for nursing, and basic data for a nursing intervention for married women from North Korea be provided. The study findings can be used as a basis for preparing a national policy that will help North Korean defectors to find employment and gain stability.
Anxiety ; Child ; Democratic People's Republic of Korea ; Emigrants and Immigrants ; Employment ; Female ; Hermeneutics ; Hope ; Humans ; Methods ; Nursing ; Nursing Care ; Qualitative Research ; Wounds and Injuries

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to explore the role of clinical nursing instructors' lived experience in clinical practicum.METHODS: Data were collected from 11 clinical nursing instructors by in-depth interviews. The data were analyzed using content analysis of Downe-Wamboldt (1992).RESULTS: Four themes and twelve subthemes were extracted. 1) Recognizing and conducting the roles of clinical nursing instructor: ‘Helping and providing support for successful clinical practicum’, ‘Coordinating clinical activities in daily practice’, ‘Providing mentoring as an elder in life’; 2) Participating in improving integrative nursing competency: ‘Helping to improve cognitive competency’, ‘Helping to improve functional competency’, ‘Contributing to form desirable professionalism’, ‘Helping to deliberate the nature of nursing’; 3) Experiencing difficulties in performing the role of clinical nursing instructor: ‘Facing with difficulty from institutional limits’, ‘Recognizing difficulty from lack of personal knowledge and experience’; 4) Experiencing value of clinical nursing instructor and accomplishing personal growth: ‘Making efforts to widen personal knowledge and experience’, ‘Developing one's own educational competency’, ‘Making a chance to reflect oneself’.CONCLUSION: Despite the distinctive features of clinical nursing instructors, little is known of the characteristics. The results of this study could be used as a reference to improve the quality of clinical nursing education.
Education ; Education, Nursing ; Humans ; Mentors ; Nursing ; Preceptorship ; Qualitative Research

PURPOSE: The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify the nature of precocious puberty and to explore what it means in primary schools.METHODS: The participants of this phenomenological study were nine primary school girls who were diagnosed with precocious puberty and experienced hormone therapeutics, applying a convenience sampling method. Data were collected from July 2017 to January 2018 through individual in-depth interviews of the participants, including gestures, facial expressions and nonverbal means. The data analysis followed the method of Giorgi.RESULTS: The study identified 37 concepts, 12 clusters, and five themes from experiences of precocious puberty. The essential five themes were as follows: ‘ashamed and concealing experience’, ‘there is no therapeutics option’, ‘difficulties in the process of therapeutics’, ‘difficulties in daily life’, and ‘ambivalence toward therapeutics’.CONCLUSION: The findings of this study indicate physical, psychological and social difficulties faced by girls with precocious puberty. Based on this results of the study, it is necessary to develop nursing intervention programs focusing on healthy growth and development for children with precocious puberty.
Child ; Facial Expression ; Female ; Gestures ; Growth and Development ; Humans ; Methods ; Nursing ; Puberty, Precocious ; Qualitative Research ; Statistics as Topic

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to explore and analyze the latest trends in domestic research related to integrated nursing care service and to present a practical direction for future research.METHODS: This study was focused on domestic nursing research related to integrated nursing care service as published in journals until March 20, 2019. After reviewing the quality of the papers, 34 papers were finally selected for analysis. In order to analyze the overall trends, the analysis was reviewed by year, source, research design, and subjects, and content analysis was used to identify trends by topic.RESULTS: From the content analysis, the top categories were divided into nurses' view and patients' view, with both nurses' view and patients' view for the subcategories of ‘input’, ‘process’ and ‘output’ respectively. From both the nurse and patient view, the sub-category ‘input’ included ‘service environment’, ‘process’ and ‘service throughput’ and for the ‘output’ subcategory, three subjects, ‘performance’, ‘service-related perception change’ and ‘social psychological change’ were derived from the nurses' view, and two subjects ‘performance’ and ‘service-related perception change’ were derived from the patients' view.CONCLUSION: In order for future studies to provide practical basic data for stable settlement and improvement of integrated nursing care service, it is necessary to develop and study various aspects without bias, and in a balanced and integrated manner.
Bias (Epidemiology) ; Classification ; Humans ; Nursing Care ; Nursing Research ; Nursing ; Research Design