Hindawi Publishing Corporation Nursing Research and Practice Volume 2013, Article ID 374132, 11 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/374132 Research Article Assessment of Ethical Ideals and Ethical Manners in Care of Older People Marianne Frilund, 1,2 Lisbeth Fagerström, 1,3 Katie Eriksson, 4,5 and Patrik Eklund 6 1 ˚ Abo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland 2 Novia University of Applied Sciences, Vaasa, Finland 3 Buskerud University College, Drammen, Norway 4 Department of Caring Science, ˚ Abo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland 5 Helsinki Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, Finland 6 Department of Computing Science, Ume˚ a University, Ume˚ a, Sweden Correspondence should be addressed to Marianne Frilund; marianne.frilund@novia.fi Received 11 December 2012; Accepted 1 February 2013 Academic Editor: Pirkko Routasalo Copyright © 2013 Marianne Frilund et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. e aim of this study is to establish structured clusters and well-defined ontological entities (nodes) describing ethical values as both ideal and opportunity for ethical manner as perceived by the caregiver. In this study, we use Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) to analyse ethical values (ethos) and ethical manners in daily work with older people. Material is based on questionnaire data collected by the instrument for the self-assessment of individual ethos in the care of older people (ISAEC) in spring 2007 in a municipality in Western Finland. is study is unique in its kind, both concerning the selected approach and methodological questions. BBNs have not been used significantly in nursing research, nor are there any studies that examine the ethical possibilities with focus on the probable effects upon changing conditions. 1. Introduction Ethical discussions between caregivers affect the quality of the older person’s care, and ˚ Agren Bolmsj¨ o et al. [1] have found that ethical decision-making supports ethically good care of patients. Berggren et al. [2] associate the discussion of ethical values with a deeper level of communication, and in order to achieve depth in such a dialogue, an ethical code and a set of ethical values which penetrate caring are needed. Awareness of such ethical values equips caregivers with a freedom and strength to make conscious decisions to do well and to do right in a given care situation. A caregiver’s ability to do well and do right is strengthened in the dialogue between caregivers and other health care professionals [3]. In this study, we use Bayesian Belief Networks [4, 5] (BBNs) to analyse ethical values (ethos) and ethical manners in daily work with older people. e advantage with BBNs is the possibility to use and compute with symbolic (symbolic data has no per se measurable or comparable values), as opposed to numeric or nominal (. . . 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are nominal not to be seen as numerical ...), data. Linear regression and comparable methods require numeric data for its computa- tions. Data used in this study are nominal in the answers to questions in the questionnaire, but inherently symbolic when arriving at ethical data and classifications of ethical manner. Further, BBNs are able to manage stochasticity and uncertainty and can work simultaneously with objective and subjective probabilities in one and the same model. Material is based on questionnaire data collected by the instrument for the self-assessment of individual ethos in the care of older people (ISAEC) in spring 2007 in a municipality in Western Finland [6]. e study is based on a caring science perspective, and caregivers’ ethical values and ethical manner which are evaluated in the study have been interpreted to the theory of caritative caring ethics [7] and to previous research on ethics in the care of older people [8–13]. e caring science