The development of nursing research in Taiwan seems to have reached the so-called “take-off” stage. Yet the relationships between nursing research, nursing reality and nursing beliefs have remained a hidden concern to the profession. The purpose of this study is to explore a proposed research methodology which can better reconcile nursing research to the nursing empirical world. This paper will be divided into two parts. The first part is a review of the development of qualitative nursing research both in Taiwan and abroad, based on the topics of epistemology, methodology and research method. Using a clinical nursing situation as an empirical world for study, inductive versus deductive approaches in analyzing quantitative research data are presented.