Michigan Leaders in Community Health Nursing Oral History Project.

In 1986, Stephanie Myers Schim began work on the "Michigan Leaders in Community Health Nursing" oral history project, part of what would eventually become her dissertation research for the Ph.D. in nursing at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. The oral history project targeted elder community/public health nurses in Michigan as the subjects for interviews. The goal for this research was to discover what led these women to pursue nursing as a career, identify what leadership roles they played, and how their profession and jobs changed throughout the years.

The in-depth interviews were conducted by Schim and other nurses and uncovered the personal and professional motivations which drew these women to their careers. The interviews reveal the leadership roles taken on by the nurses within the community health care system. Topics include the changing nature of and the treatment of nurses in their jobs, to how they went about facilitating change within their communities for better health care and education.

The information gathered by Schim and her associates resulted in a published article and Schim's dissertation. The article entitled "Uniting the Past and the Future in Public Health Nursing: The Michigan Oral History Project" by Marie F. Gates, Stephanie M. Schim, and Lillian Ostrand, was published in Public Health Nursing, December 1994. Schim's dissertation "Leadership Experiences of Elder Community Health Nurse Leaders in Michigan," was completed and accepted in 1997.