Starting from this initiative, teaching and practice strategies were developed to provide tools to use the nursing process in the curricula of undergraduate programs and in health institutions.These strategies aimed to incorporate it as a nursing care method, focused on care and also to facilitate its integration in the construction movement of health care as a social and collective good. In the attempt to address these questions, this study aimed to: understand the meaning attributed to the nursing process by nurses from a hospitalization unit in Mexico and describe actions they perform at this unit according to the meaning they attribute to the nursing process.
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKSThis qualitative study is based on SymbolicInteractionism because it emphasizes the nature of social interaction, the dynamics and social activity involving actors, in the perspective that considers an active human being in his(er) environment as an organism that interacts with others and with the self.Interaction means that the actions of each human being are continually constructed, which in part depends on what others do, influencing each other.In acting and interacting, language is used that originates from intersubjectivity, basically operating in symbolic realities sustained in this intersubjective space (9) . Symbolic interactionism is a social science perspective designed to produce knowledge on collective human life and its conduct; focusing on the meaning events have for human beings and symbols used to attribute meaning to them. These symbols are socially developed during interaction and are agreed upon inside groups.Symbolic interactionism is based on the following principles: human beings act in relation to objects based on meanings these have to them; the meaning attributed to objects/things originates from social interactions between human beings; meanings are manipulated and changed through an interpretative process, developed by human beings when they are faced with objects and themselves (10) .Human interaction is mediated by the use of symbols, interpretation and investigation of the meaning of others' actions.Grounded Theory (GT) was the methodological framework of this study, which is rooted in SymbolicInteractionism and aims to generate theory as from obtained data, submitted to systematic and comparative analysis, organized in conceptual categories that explain the phenomenon under study.
330GT is a method that maintains a close relation between systematic data collection, analysis and theory that emerge during investigation. The theory emerges from reality and is not a mere connection of concepts based on experience or assumptions on how things should be or work (11) .This methodological design demands ongoing data comparison, the researcher's theoretical sensitivity, theoretical sampling of empirical reality, notes that corroborate the process of open, axial and selective codification so as to assure the conceptual development and density. The result of this codification and integration ...