Family Health Assessment in Community Nursing Practice

The family is essential for promoting health. Nurses are well placed to advance family health care. Nursing work and assessment of family health needs is multi-dimensional and complex. Limited work exists in this area of practice. This book examines community nurses’ assessment practice from a theoretical and family-focused perspective to gain a deeper understanding of the process. The integration of symbolic interactionist and family systems perspectives grounded within a constructionist methodology allowed a fusion of these theoretical orientations. This was achieved by comparative multi-case study design. All four cases included a community nurse and a family. Comparing cases extended the exploratory design and added explanatory power by using Stake’s concept of “quintain” and by developing a novel analytical framework. Abductive inferential reasoning is rarely discussed in constructionist methodology, case study design or nursing research and can be useful to researchers across disciplines. Understanding the co-constructed meanings of family health assessment in primary care should be relevant globally to nurses involved in promoting family health care nursing.