Timothy Joseph Sowicz

Introduction The invitation to write this editorial coincided with an outing to a university bookstore where plainly designed university branded apparel, such as hats and shirts, displayed the names of the colleges of law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, and veterinary medicine. Two t-shirts caught my eye because they were unlike the others; their designs were cartoonish and did not include university or college logos.

Issuing a call for papers, in part, about “understudied phenomena” that interest nurses was a bold act albeit with some underlying assumptions. At the outset, we acknowledged that authors would broadly interpret the title of the call, despite the bounds we placed on it: “understudied” as those phenomena that have received little attention in academic journals including new or emerging topics, ideas, etc.

Procedures Participant recruitment A convenience sample of nurses was recruited for the study through a web-based announcement on the ASPMN's listserv, postings on the organization's weekly E-News Brief, and snowball sampling of authors’ and participants’ colleagues.