S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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appropriate design under five circumstances: (1) in a critical case testing a well-formulated theory, (2) in an extreme or unique case, (3) in a representative or typical case, (4) in a revelatory case or (5) in a longitudinal case (Yin, 1970, 1978, 2003, 2009). This study did not involve critical, extreme or unique cases, as there is a level of uniformity of circumstances, issues and influences across the delivery of mental healthcare by remote nurses and it is not by design a longitudinal study. The choice between representative, typical and revelatory cases was decided in favour of the latter on the basis of a lack of previous literature, as addressed in Chapter 3. There have been no prior case studies concerning remote nurses delivering mental healthcare in Australia. Hence, a revelatory case study was chosen to probe and analyse a new area of discovery (Carroll & Johnson, 1990) and a set of poorly understood phenomena (Yin, 1994). The next research design question was the choice between holistic (Gangeness & Yurkovich, 2006) and embedded units of analysis (Yin, 2003, 2009). Holistic case studies focus on the comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon (remote nurses delivering mental healthcare), where understanding the whole phenomenon is more important than understanding its parts or sub-units (i.e. individual studies of participant remote nurses delivering mental healthcare) (Heinz, 2007). This case study was not designed to use clustering or sampling techniques (McClintock, 1985), but was a study of the ‘global nature’ (Yin, 2003, p. 43) of the delivery of mental healthcare by remote nurses. The researcher examined multiple data sources from varying levels, degrees and perspectives of involvement in the delivery of mental healthcare by remote nurses, including Commonwealth, State, local, systems, funding, policy, academic, educative, professional representation and the remote nurses themselves. These multiple sources of data facilitated

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