S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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solely adopting an outsider’s (etic) stance. As a very experienced remote nurse, the researcher possessed and could draw on a detailed understanding and familiarity with the field. This familiarity provided the researcher with a refined understanding of the context that would be absent in an inexperienced or non-remote nurse researcher. The researcher’s familiarity with the written and spoken language of remote nurses enhanced his insider (emic) perspective of the study (Pike, 1967). With such familiarity, understanding the field and its practices added a further dimension of research understanding and analysis. Despite this previous insider experience, the researcher was very mindful to maintain the appropriate balance between the emic and etic perspectives. For example, the researcher had no direct supervisory or employment relationship with the participants in this study. This distancing between the researcher and the participants permitted what Brewer (2000) referred to as the ‘critical gaze’, which is essential in maintaining balance between the emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives (Pike, 1967). The researcher’s experiences facilitated connections of understanding, identified areas of importance for closer interrogation, identified issues of divergence between the remote nurses’ accounts and illuminated factors of influence (positive and negative) that affect remote nurses caring for mental health clients. Consequently, the researcher, as the primary analytic instrument, was readily equipped to move recursively and continuously through the data until arriving at theoretical saturation (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) and ‘particularisation of the issue’ (Stake, 1995, p. 8). There exist a variety of methods for researchers to use in undertaking case study research (Bromley, 1986; Creswell, 2007; Merriam, 1991; Stake, 1995, 2000; Yin, 2003). All place particular emphasis on the recursive gathering and analysis of data. As the