This article outlines a research methodology that embraces individual narratives, yet recognizes that individual narratives are nested within a backdrop of broader social and cultural understandings of who we are and how we come to understand our world. This dialectical move requires an epistemological shift, focusing on the utility of reconceptualizing the 'environment', not only as the social, political, or economic conditions in society, but also as language. Reconceptualizing the environment as language makes it epistemologically possible to construct a bridge between varying levels of analysis, namely, between individual accounts and life stories and the cultural, social, and historical worlds from which those accounts emerge.

New directives in health care research challenge researchers to move analysis beyond that of the individual and focus on social, cultural, and historical processes as interrelated determinants of health and illness. Adhering to a poststructuralist methodology, this article moves the analytic focus beyond individualistic narratives and into social and cultural discourses concerning recovery from anorexia nervosa. This study focused on social and cultural assumptions identified, seemingly as a paradox, through accounts articulated by young women who are in recovery or have recovered from anorexia nervosa. By theorizing outside of an individualized framework, it is possible to foreground the relationships between individualism, health, self-surveillance, women, the body, and the notion of recovery from anorexia.

This paper delineates a postmodern discourse analysis that is positioned within a semiotic theory of language. This theory of language foregrounds the performative aspects of language usage and provides the theoretical space from which to theorize the interrelationship between social organizations or structure and social agents or individuals. Our version of discourse analysis contends that social structure is enacted (production and reproduction) through the employment of various vocabularies: social structure is not something outside of, behind, or underneath these performances, and we argue that social organization is not produced by external structures operating upon or causing people to adopt certain behaviours. Rather, social structure is an effect of taking up practices and reproducing and modifying them. From this perspective, individuals are constituted by being recruited into and reproducing discursive practices. Hence, by looking at the actual employment of language – its tactical, practice dimensions – one can avoid the usual binary of seeing the person as either the autonomous origin of his or her experience or the ideological pawn of social determination. This methodology calls into question how the narratives or stories that individuals recount are imbricated within relational plays of power, and concomitantly, how subjects reauthorize their own positions. We assert that the methodological challenges of research addressing social injustice cannot be reduced to either: (i) interpersonal relationships between researcher and participants, or (ii) relegated to ‘social structures’ acting upon or outside of individuals.

0 3 ) Journal of Advanced Nursing 41 (6), [536][537][538][539][540][541][542][543][544] Constructing experience in individual interviews, autobiographies and on-line accounts: a poststructuralist approach Aims. A poststructuralist orientation to language contends that individuals inherit the language they present to others -and in the context of research, stories and accounts are understood because researchers and research participants share such inheritances. Nurse theorists have foregrounded the constructive aspects of language yet few scholars have focused on how context and different narrative structures affect story construction. Story presentations are always sculpted by the context in which they are told. Thus, the construction of individual experience is neither a-historical nor a-contextual. Methods. This work emanates from a larger study that focused on the social construction of anorexia nervosa and in which data were collected from 12 individual interviews, autobiographical accounts and postings from a public Internet group. A poststructuralist orientation to how data are theorized and analysed was used for the study. This article focuses on the differences of account presentation between the three different types of data. Conclusions. Individuals inherit not only shared language, but the customs in which language is exchanged, for example, how interviews are performed, memoirs are written, and on-line conversations are constructed. Focusing on context foregrounds the notion that stories have different functions and outcomes, depending on the purpose of the telling. Hence, the social and cultural frameworks in which stories are communicated are not incidental, but instrumental to what can be articulated in the production of individual experience.

Conceptual teaching in nursing education offers benefits over traditional content and fact-laden curricula, including the development of cognitive skills necessary for knowledge transfer across contexts and the ability to transform students into lifelong learners. The recent focus on active and learner-centered teaching techniques does not equate to learning conceptually, although it is a positive move away from teacher-centered techniques. A paucity of educational nursing literature exists that delineates both the theory and methods used to teach conceptually. We present a semiotic framework for teaching conceptually, in addition to outlining three core components necessary for conceptual learners: addressing misconceptions, developing enduring understandings, and acquiring metacognitive skills. Five teaching methods that are particularly fitting for concept-based curricula and useful across all program levels are described and outlined. Active and learner-centered activities can also be designed and adapted to develop the mindset necessary to learn conceptually.