Surfacing Filipino student nurses' perspectives of comfort and comforting viewed through metaphorical lens.

BACKGROUND: Comfort has been an integral component of nursing interventions. It is also supposed that the degree to which comfort
is evidenced in nursing performance depends in great measure on the way forthcoming nurses perceive the said construct during their educational training.

OBJECTIVE: This study purports to describe student nurses' outlook of the words "comfort" and "comforting", through conscious doodling, and at the same time to find out instances of similarity or striking distinctions in students' perception on the said terms.

METHOD: A sample of 163 freshmen and 116 senior students were provided with a 2-part questionnaire. The first part used a robotfoto to determine the student subject's cartographic sketch. In the second part, a sheet of paper was given to each respondent who was asked to sketch a particular object, event or thought with which he associates the words, comfort and comforting. Moreover, a brief explanation of their illustrations was also called for. Metaphor representations were drawn up and analyzed and clustered according to their similarities in meaning, representation and the number of times the sketches were utilized by the respondents in order to comprehend how they interpret their sketches.

CONCLUSIONS: Interestingly, this study yielded four major aspects that reflected the respondent's perception on the words "comfort" and "comforting", namely; physiologic, socio-environmental, psycho-spiritual and emotional. Results of this qualitative study did not show any marked difference in the interpretation of the construct under investigation on the comparison of the student's perception of the terms "comfort" and "comforting". (Author)