S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

358

In case studies, it is the researcher who is the instrument of data gathering and analysis and who undertakes deep and prolonged engagement with the case in its context. Stake (1995) called on researchers to consider their role in data gathering and analysis. He emphasised that the researcher’s role as ‘interpreter’ is to examine ‘the nature and quality of activities and processes, portraying them in narrative description and interpretive assertion’ (p. 96). In such instances, a researcher is immersed in the context of the research, where it is their responsibility to develop an understanding of the issue(s) by spending ‘extended time on-site, personally in contact with activities and operations of the case, reflecting, and revising descriptions and meanings of what is going on’ (Stake, 2000, p. 442). The subjectivity of the researcher’s experience of nursing in remote locations and his interpretations were an inherent part of the research process. Interpretively, the researcher and the participants were inexorably linked in the study design, in both the generation of data and its analysis. This study acknowledges that the gathering and interpreting of insiders’ perspectives (i.e. remote nurses and other participants) enabled a deeper and richer understanding of the world of remote nurses caring for mental health clients than would be available from an outsider’s (etic) stance. The justification of the researcher’s choice was that ‘an emic perspective attempts to capture participants’ indigenous meanings of real world events’ (Yin, 2011, p. 11), and ‘looks at things through the eyes of members of the culture being studied’ (Willis, 2007, p. 100). As a very experienced remote nurse, the researcher possessed and could draw on a detailed existing understanding and familiarity with the field. This familiarity provided the researcher with a refined understanding of the context that would be absent in an