Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

From practice to research
developed and often after real damage had been done
to the mother–infant relationship and the couple relationship.
So I became interested in how primary health
care workers like maternal and child health nurses
might be able to identify post-partum depression and
make earlier referrals. I enrolled in a Master’s degree
and for my thesis I intended to develop a simple
instrument for the nurses to identify post-partum
depression and test it for its validity and reliability—a
very traditional research project really, which others
have subsequently done with the Edinburgh Post-Natal
Depression Instrument. But it didn’t turn out as I
intended. The nurses told me that they didn’t have a
mandate to do mental-state examinations on mothers—
that women came to see them to have their babies
weighed and measured and that the mothers were
highly sensitive to nurses prying into private issues
such as their emotional state. In my literature search
I also read an article on a study on anxiety among
mothers of young babies and when I followed it up
and spoke with the researcher she told me that the
nurses had discarded that instrument as soon as the
research was finished! There seemed little point in
developing an instrument which nurses were not
prepared to use. So instead I thought it might be useful
to observe at length how nurses who were regarded
by their peers as being particularly skilled in their
interpersonal skills went about assessing women
for depression. I suppose we would see it today as
describing ‘best practice’. I also wanted to understand
the norms which governed the interaction between the
nurse and the mother, and to interview mothers about
what they saw as the role of the nurse and what they
might find acceptable in regard to the nurse exploring
issues related to their emotional well-being. So I used
a number of methods—direct observation of three
purposively selected maternal and child health nurses
at work, followed by in-depth interviews with the
nurses, and semi-structured interviews with a mixture
of closed and open-ended questions with a sample
of 45 mothers in their homes. While I was doing the
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