Abstract

To develop nursing as a critical normative science (Kirkevold, 2009), a description of the various care areas and different health phenomena is needed. This is being done on the basis of various qualitative methods´; hence within nursing discourse analysis is used to a limited extent. The aim of this paper is to exemplify phenomenon and topics within nursing that have been studied by using discourse analysis. The examples are from studies conducted during the previous years by the authors. Discourses within palliative care based on documents and observations (2009), nursing as a subordinated profession, based on media analysis (2009), and an ongoing study about discourses within care of children with diabetes based on policy documents in the Nordic countries.

Discourse analysis provides data, such as interviews, actions and documents to be analyzed in a broader system of knowledge (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2000., Lupton, 1993). A discourse is a “systems of thought and systematic ways of carving out reality and is composed by structures of knowledge that influences systems of practice” (Chambon, 1999). All discourses are textual and an inter-textual drawing upon other texts, contextually embedded in historical political and cultural settings. A given text also transforms in a manner that is socially constrained and conditional upon relations of power (Foucault 1979). As Bacchi (2005) urges it is possible to adopt a more comprehensive dual-focus agenda in discourse analysis, taking into account the dual movement of discourse: the way discourse speaks us and the way we speak the discourse.