Social Justice in Nursing: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While social justice is widely upheld as a foundational value and responsibility within nursing, this concept remains poorly articulated and lacking in a clear and cohesive definition. In particular, prior conceptualizations of social justice within nursing have been critiqued as lacking a strong theoretical foundation and being insufficiently critical in orientation. Resultantly, guidance for nurses in engaging in social justice action is scant, and ultimately, the profession is challenged in truly taking up social justice as a central aim. As such, this critical interpretive synthesis aims to explore and synthesize how social justice is conceptualized within the nursing literature, and apply critical theoretical approaches to re-conceptualize social justice to guide nursing theory, research, and practice. To comprehensively review the literature on social justice (and the related concept of equity) in nursing, CINAHL and Medline (Ovid) databases were searched using nursing, social justice, and equity keywords. Following title/abstract and full text screening of 1428 references, N = 216 were retained for analysis, utilizing critical interpretive synthesis approaches through a critical social theory lens. Through a critical thematic analysis of the nursing literature, this review identifies that concepts of social justice and equity were often conflated in the nursing literature, and that dominant conceptualizations advance notions of social justice as distributive justice and as fairness. Engaging with these dominant conceptualizations through a critical lens illustrates that a re-conceptualization of social justice is necessary to establish conceptual clarity and more meaningfully support nurses in engaging with social justice through theory and practice. As such, this review presents the following re-conceptualized definition of social justice: As a guiding principle for nursing, social justice is a process of recognizing and remediating inequities at individual and structural levels towards a state of equity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".