Determining AACN's research priorities for the 90s

The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses completed a three-phased process of priority identification for critical care nursing research. In phase 1, a 78-item survey was generated following a comprehensive review of potential research topics. In phase 2, approximately 1000 critical care nurses rated each item on the survey for importance to critical care nursing. Based on these results, the AACN Research Committee formulated a clinical and a nonclinical (contextual) list of research topics. Each list contained 25 topics. In phase 3, topics were given final rankings at a 1-day Consensus Conference on Research Priorities. Both Likert-type and magnitude estimation scaling were used to determine priority ranking of items on each list. As a result, both clinical and contextual research priorities were established for AACN.