Preserving Dignity in Care: Exploring Nursing Students’ Perceptions using Nominal Group Technique (NGT)

Nominal Group Technique (NGT) may be defined as a highly structured approach used to explore areas of interest and develop consensus (Van De Ven and Delbecq, 1972; McCance et al., 2012). The decision to use NGT in the first strand of this doctoral study of adult nursing students’ perspectives on preserving dignity in care was informed primarily by the need to build an instrument for data collection in the second strand. This paper will provide a brief introduction to NGT, outline its practical application in the context of this study, present some key findings and summarise the strengths and limitations of the approach. NGT consists of four key stages: silent generation of ideas; sharing of ideas; group discussion and individual voting and ranking (Kennedy and Clinton, 2009). Thirty-one adult nursing students participated in one of five, cohort-specific, nominal groups and the results analysed by qualitative and quantitative analysis. With its focus on problem exploration and group decision-making, NGT provided rich insight into nursing students’ personal, shared and differing viewpoints on the complex problem of preserving dignity in care. References Kennedy, A., and Clinton, C. (2009) Identifying the professional development needs of early career teachers in Scotland using nominal group technique. Teacher Development [Online] Vol.13(1), pp. 29-41. Available: Taylor and Francis Online [Accessed: 28 October 2014]. McCance, T., Telford, L., Wilson, J., MacLeod, O., and Dowd, A. (2012) Identifying key performance indicators for nursing and midwifery care using a consensus approach. Journal of Clinical Nursing [Online] Vol.21(7/8), pp. 1145-1154. Available: CINAHL Complete [Accessed: 10 July 2014]. Van De Ven, A. H., and Delbecq, A. L. (1972) The Nominal Group as a Research Instrument for Exploratory Health Studies. American Journal of Public Health [Online] Vol.62(3), pp. 337-342. Available: SocINDEX with Full Text [Accessed: 10 July 2014]