Communication among mental health nurses: A field study of mental health nursing practices

The analysis of discourse is appropriated by nursing scholars. ‘Discourse analysis’ covers a wide spectrum of approaches to analysing meaning and language and there is no widely accepted definition of either a concept or an analysis of discourse. A sample of the discourse analyses indexed in the CINAHL database was analysed in order to identify which notions of discourse and discourse analysis are preferred by nursing scholars. The results showed that nursing scholars prefer approaches to discourse which resemble mainstream qualitative research avoiding social life and interaction. Explanations for these findings are briefly outlined.