S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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inexperienced or non-remote nurse researchers. The researcher’s familiarity with the written and spoken language of remote nurses enhanced the insider (emic) perspective of the study (Pike, 1967). With such familiarity, understanding the field and practices therein, added a further dimension of research understanding and analysis. Although an insider due to previous 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) refers to as the critical gaze. While the primary focus was an emic approach, the researcher does recognise that both perspectives are valuable in the study of social behaviour (Patton, 2002). Any variation between emic and etic perspectives is a research opportunity rather than a limitation. Agar (2011) stated that ‘etic and emic … are not separate kinds of understanding when one person makes sense of another. They are both part of any understanding’ (p. 39). Accordingly, differences in perspective are in themselves fruitful, as Yin (2011) explained that ‘a common theme underlying many qualitative studies is to demonstrate how participants’ perspectives may diverge dramatically from those held by outsiders’ (p. 13). This is starkly illustrated in Chapter 6, where the low self-perceived levels of knowledge, skills and competencies of remote generalist nurses were compared to the high levels of regard in which they were held by the other actors in the social world. As the ‘interpreter’, 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