Examining the nurses' perceptions about researches and factors that prevent usage of the results in their applications.

The aim of this study is to determine nurses? perceptions about research and the factors that prevent them from using research results in their practice.This study was designed as a cross-sectional and analytical study and it was conducted between April 2011 and July 2011 with 391 nurses working in two hospitals, one of which was university hospital. For data collection, ?Question Form? was used to determine demographic characteristics and the nurses? views about research and the ?Research Barriers Scale? was used in order to determine the factors that facilitate use of research. Descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney-U test and Kruskal-Wallis test were used in data analysis. In variables with more than two sub-groups, LSD and Tukey test were used as post-hoc to identify the group making a difference.The mean age of the nurses in this study was 31.12 ± 6.90. The study found that 85.9% of the nurses were female, 43.2% held a bachelors degree, 25.8% had worked for 2-5 years, 85.9% were clinical nurses. Also, 54.2% of the nurses had not been involved in a scientific research before, those nurses who reported that they had been involved in a scientific research participated as a part of the audience by 62.1%, as paper presenters by 14.1% and as members of the organization by 5.4%. The study found that the total score of the nurses? perceptions that prevent them from using research results in their practice were moderate. The barrier sub-scale perceived by the highest percentage of nurses was institutional barriers. Also, five out of the top ten items that were perceived as an obstacle were those in the practice sub-scale. Recommendations for future research include developing strategies about institutional and educational regulations and carrying out similar studies in different institutions with larger samples in order to increase the use of research results in practice.