UNCOVERING AND MANAGING DENIAL DURING THE RESEARCH PROCESS

This article describes experiences of geropsychiatric nurses examining the effectiveness of the progressively Lowered Stress Threshold Model for caregivers of persons with Alzheimer's disease and related disord ers, and briefly reviews the literature on coping and denial, This res earch project, and those of many other psychiatric nurses, is predicat ed on the expectation that subjects will be able to acknowledge and re port to investigators their personal and intimate responses to the cha llenges and everyday experiences of caregiving, Clearly, the research findings will be most valid if subjects are completely open about all aspects of their experiences, no matter how painful; yet this is often an idealized expectation. Therefore, this article also explores the c oncerns of geropsychiatric nurse researchers attempting to balance sen sitivity to the needs of subjects and the reliability and validity of the data. Copyright (C) 1995 by W.B. Saunders Company