Psychiatric Nurses and the Internet

This page provides links to the findings of a research study undertaken by Richard Lakeman in June-July 1996.

These findings were presented at:
Lakeman, R. (1996). The internet: Facilitating and international nursing culture. (Conference Proceedings). (pp. 261-282). Auckland: ANZCMHN
and published in: Lakeman, R. (1996). Psychiatric nursing. The Internet: facilitating an international nursing culture for psychiatric nurses. Computers in Nursing, 16(2), 87-9.

Study Aims and Methodology

The aims of this study were as follows:

1. To describe how psychiatric nurses currently use the internet.
2. To describe how psychiatric nurses who currently use the internet perceive how the internet will affect / alter nursing culture.
3. To describe how psychiatric nurses learn the rules of internet communication.

An email message was posted to two nursing email discussion groups, 'psych-nursing' and 'nursenet' as well as the news-group 'sci.med.nursing' requesting psychiatric nurses respond in order to assist with the research project. In the body of the message a series of questions were posed relating to the aims of the study. A brief description of the methodology was provided as well as assurances that no identifying data would be included in the final research report. Respondents were requested to email their responses to the author, not back to the lists.

The text from the e-mail responses that were received over a two week period were 'cut and pasted' into a text editor programme on an IBM compatible computer. The data was then 'cleaned', that is all information not pertaining to the questions was removed including headings, identifying data and unwanted symbols. Minor and obvious typographical errors were corrected and carriage returns were stripped from within paragraphs. Approximately 400 corrections were made although these did not in any way alter the quality of the data. The responses to question one, relating to how long the individual had been using the internet was converted into months and entered into 'Excel', a spreadsheet program. A symbol was inserted to identify the beginning of a response to each question. The 'cleaned' text consisting of the responses to the 5 remaining questions was then saved as a separate file.

Each file was introduced into a text management program called NUD*IST (Non numerical Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching and Theory Building), a program designed to organise and categorise qualitative data. Using NUD*IST the responses to each question were analysed separately. The responses were categorised and coded line by line according to themes which emerged from the data. The data and the emerging themes or categories were reviewed several times by the author and once by the author and supervisor so that the labels given to the identified themes best reflected the data. Reports were generated for each question including a list of the labelled categories and examples from the data which reflected each category. These reports were imported into a word-processor in order to prepare the final research report.