Walker & Avant Concept Analysis: The 8 Steps

Concept analysis is a common requirement in graduate nursing theory courses — the goal is to clarify a concept used loosely in practice (like "comfort," "resilience," or "moral distress") into something precise enough to measure or build a framework around. The Walker and Avant method is the most widely used approach for this.

The 8 steps

1. Select a concept — ideally one relevant to your practice area or planned research, not overly abstract.
2. Determine the purpose of the analysis — are you clarifying the concept for theory-building, instrument development, or clinical practice?
3. Identify uses of the concept — how the term is used across dictionaries, disciplines, and the nursing literature, not just how you personally understand it.
4. Determine defining attributes — the characteristics that appear most consistently across uses; this is the analytic core of the method.
5. Construct a model case — a real-world example that includes all the defining attributes, illustrating the concept in its clearest form.
6. Construct additional cases — borderline, related, contrary, and (optionally) invented or illegitimate cases, each showing what the concept is not or partially is.
7. Identify antecedents and consequences — what must occur before the concept happens, and what results from it.
8. Define empirical referents — how the concept could actually be measured or observed, which matters most if instrument development is your end goal.

Where students lose points

• Defining attributes that are too broad or too numerous to be analytically useful — aim for the smallest set that reliably distinguishes the concept.
• A model case that's missing one of the stated defining attributes, which undermines the analysis's internal consistency.
• Confusing antecedents (what comes before) with defining attributes (what the concept actually consists of).

A concept analysis often becomes the theoretical foundation section of a larger DNP project or dissertation — see our guide to DNP capstone project ideas and structure for how it fits into the bigger picture.