Qualitative Research Proposal: Challenges faced by graduate students in the field of nursing: A case study of first year nurses in King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Saudi Arabia.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROPOSAL
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Challenges faced by graduate students in the field of nursing: A case study of first year nurses in King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been known to depend on nurses that are not from its country. In any case, recruitment of these non-Saudi nurses has had its challenges majorly the result of the 1991 Gulf war and also the political instability of the Middle East since that war. Saudi Arabia healthcare services demands expand exponentially and though there are graduates annually, the supply of these graduates is insufficient to meet their rising demands of healthcare services in Saudi Arabia, as Almaki, FitzGerald and Clark found out "the challenge chronic shortage of nurses in Saudi Arabia has been made intense by high rates of turnover." (306). Their study further reinforced the fact that the expatriate form a larger proportion of nursing professional in Saudi Arabia, thus: "the Saudis comprise of a paltry only 29.1% of the nursing population which gets even lower in the private health facilities where they make up only 4.1 percent of the total." (306).
Considering the world-wide percentage of nurses, Saudi Arabia has less than 30% of the nurses. Several sources in Saudi Arabia have linked this low percentage to factors influencing social and cultural parameters in the sense that there are more negative prevailing images and perception than positive ones that portray nursing to having low status. These factors include mixing of gender in the profession, long hours of working as well as shift rotating happen to render nursing a socially unacceptable choice of occupation.
This has therefore motivated me to develop interest on a personal level to explore how these prevalent images about nursing, and status perception has impacted the Saudi Arabia nurses, and also the perception the specified nurses have on their choices on nursing as an occupation.  According to the World Health Organization (2006), there is a shortage of nurses in Saudi Arabia, a phenomenon caused by low enrolments in course that offer nursing options. Currently, Saudi Arabia relies on immigrant nurses who make up to 60% of the total number of staff.
The background of this research study will be the focus in student graduates in their first year of working as nurses in Saudi Arabia.
Conceptual Framework
There are a myriad of challenges that face many new graduate in the Saudi Arabian health sector, according to Ministry of Education, "the health services organizations of Saudi Arabia are labor intensive, nurses making a large part of this labor, which becomes a major challenge to many fresh graduates who are struggling to acclimatize themselves with the system while at the same time much is being expected of them." (1424). Further, with over 80 percent of the Saudi Arabian nursing workforce being noncitizens, communication between these new nurses and the patients, their families as well as their colleagues becomes extremely difficult due to the social cultural and language barriers (Almaki, FitzGerald and Clark, 2011). Some health organizations in Saudi Arabia have embarked on ambitious ‘saudizitation` programs which are aimed at recruiting, training and retaining nurses who are of Saudi origin with the ends of tackling this problem, however, the success of these programs has been undermined by the difficulty of finding graduates who are qualified that they can recruit (Zradi, Zaiden and Shehri, 2013).
New nurses in Saudi Arabia also have the grapple with the social stigma of working as a nurse. The Saudi Arabian society has come a long way to almost completely view nursing as a profession they would want for their children especially for the female (Almaki, FitzGerald and Clark, 2011). The same was the predicament about 40 years ago when the country first embarked on mainstreaming formal girl`s education and schools in all parts of Saudi Arabia. At that time, many families had downright reservations about sending their daughters to school, they were extremely opposed to girls` schools that were coming up, but the political will of the nations as well as the right policies prevailed leading to an increase in the number of Saudi female students, where today their number is higher than that of their male counterparts (Sabbagh, 1996). However, despite this many of the new female nurses are faced with some of the underlying social economic factors which are affecting the whole health sector.
Research question
`Challenges faced by graduate students in the field of nursing by first year nurses in King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Saudi Arabia.
Research Objectives
The main aim of the study is to access opinions and views factors that got them interested in the field of nursing. The other aim is to compare the experiences of nurses as well as the challenges faced by these nurses in the field. Another aim of the study is to examine the views of participants in regards to policies of nursing in Saudi Arabia on training and employing nurses.
Theoretical framework/Phenomenology
This study seeks to find out the specific challenges that are faced by graduate nurses in their first year as nursing practitioners, appropriately therefore, the methodology that it will deploy is phenomenology. Phenomenology can be defined as a science which aims at describing certain or particular phenomena as a lived experience (Speziale & Carpenter, 2010). The approach phenomenology fits the research because it is concerned with the objects of perception in which consciousness is necessarily directed. The discipline of phenomenology studies structures on conscious experience from a first-person perspective along with the relevant conditions of the person`s experience. Such experiences could come in the form of perceptions, thoughts emotions, desires, volition, and actions. The domain of phenomenology is therefore the range of experiences like the just mentioned as well as others. Experiences however do not only include those ones that are relatively passive like hearing and vision, it also includes active experiences like caring for the patients in our case. Phenomenology achieves its goal through the use of special investigator stances and specialized methods of selecting participant, socialization of information and the assembly of components of the interview into a final report.
The major strength of phenomenological as a qualitative methodology is that it provides a rich and wide scope description of human experiences and meanings. The study findings are allowed to emerge instead of being imposed by the investigator. The ultimate weakness of method is that the conclusion ultimately depends on the particular participant selected to take part in the study. In phenomenology`s orientation to a particular moment or time frame, it has the potency of missing information on broader periods or even about the development or time frame of the experience. In laying focus on a rich description of a particular experience, the method could miss the all important information on what lead to that experience, the outcomes, the contaminants and the other factors that are associated with the experience.
Research site
The research will be conducted in King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre. The researcher will obtain permission from the management of this medical facility, to allow for conducting the research. The rationale conducting the research on this one site most immediately is the fact that King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre represents the modern day health facility in any part of the world. KFSH&RC is a Joint Commission International accredited medical facility with state-of-the-art 894 bed capacity including 170 day beds. Further, the health facility is the oncology, cardiovascular disease and organ transplant national referral centre. It is such remarkable record and impressive credibility that makes KFSH&RC a very eligible research site. Additionally, the post graduate education programs at the hospital supports both residency and fellowship training. Statistics on staffing composition at KFHSRC mirror the national statistics in terms of the percentage of Saudi nurses compared to the number of those from other countries. At the health facility, the nursing staffs that make up 1942 of the total population have Americans and Canadians making up a total of 29 percent of the total, while the rest are from Europe, UK, Australia, Philippines and Saudi Arabia.
Sampling
Selecting a proper sampling method is a process by which representative individuals are selected randomly to provide insights on the entire population that is being studies. This can be done through four principle methods which are: simple random sampling, stratified sampling, cluster sampling and systematic sampling. The sampling technique that this study will adopt is stratified sample which is a probability sampling technique where the researcher sub divides the entire population to be covered into different subgroups or strata. It is a most preferable approach if the researcher wants to highlight a particular subgroup within the sample population. One loophole that this study will want to evade is a situation where the subgroups used in this approach would overlap (Thorne, 1997) . When the strata used overlaps, then it gives some individuals a higher chance than others to get selected as subjects in the sample. Such a situation would means that it would seize from becoming a probability sample. This being evidence based nursing research; the population will be people who can give insight on issues pertaining health care: health practitioners, industry players, health organizations, health researchers and patients as the five strata.
The purpose of the qualitative research is to identify specific groups of people who either possess characteristics or live in circumstances relevant to the social phenomenon that will be studied. A sample is a subset of a specified ...