IS one public health nurse needed for every 2,500 people? Should every local health agency be expected to make field experience available for students? In what ways can nurses function most effectively in meeting the legal responsibilities of the health department? These and similar problems arise daily as the nursing profession seeks better ways to meet its responsibility to the patient and to the community. It is easy enough to raise such questions. Finding answers is a real feat, but is not impossible. Essentially this becomes a matter of research. But what is research? An unnamed source has defined research as "dragging data out of an inaccessible place, tabulating them, and then filing thein in an equally inaccessible place." Another has said, "research is not everything someone has thought about twice." The dictionary defines research as "diligent protracted investigation; studious inquiry. Specifically in science, a systematic investigation of some phenomenon or series of phenomena by the experimental method." Pauline Young, in Scientific Social Surveys and Research, describes social research "as the systematic method of discovering new facts or verifying old facts, their sequences, interrelationships, causal explanations, and the natural laws which govern them. The primary goal of research-immediate or distant-is to