Guidelines as governance: Critical reflections from a documentary analysis of guidelines to support user involvement in research.

Although guidelines to regulate user involvement in research have been advocated and implemented for several years, literature still describes the process as challenging. In this qualitative study, we take a critical view on guidelines that are developed to regulate and govern the collaboration process of user involvement in research. We adapt a social constructivist view of guidelines and our aim is to explore how guidelines construct the perception of users and researchers and thus the process of involvement. Twenty-two guidelines published between 2006 and 2019 were analyzed iteratively. The analysis focuses on values which are emphasized in the guidelines on the distribution of entities, knowledge, and tasks between users and researchers. The analysis indicates that users and researchers are constructed differently; researchers are mainly constructed as responsible initiators and caretakers, while users are constructed as powerless and vulnerable. The guidelines portray the collaboration process as harmonious and assume a normative perspective. In doing so, challenges described in the literature related to power imbalances are not addressed. Based on these findings, we ask if these guidelines might function to maintain existing power imbalances between users and researchers.

In search of the changeable: An analysis of visual representations of nursing in Norwegian and Danish professional nursing journals, 1965-2016.

In this study, we demonstrate how perceptions of nursing are constructed in close connection with the development of the Nordic welfare states. Drawing on Gillian Rose's framework for analysing the social and political implications of visual materials, we analysed selected visual representations of nursing published in Danish and Norwegian professional nursing journals in the period 1965 to 2016. The analyses were conducted in an iterative process in three phases. First, we reviewed all visuals spanning the entire period to obtain an overview of developmental trends in the material. Second, selected visuals and associated captions were subjected to more thorough analysis. Third, we further examined and discussed the visuals in light of societal and political movements and ideologies in Danish and Norwegian healthcare policies over this period. Our analysis shows that visual representations of the nurse-patient relationship and of the patient's and the nurse's roles and responsibilities changed over this period and that the visualisations corresponded with and supported developments in the Danish and Norwegian welfare states as these first consolidated and then moved towards individualisation and the competition state. Our study demonstrates that nurses in these states are political actors implementing health policies embedded in various knowledge regimes.