Helping methods used by nurses in a psychiatric hospital environment

This qualitative study aims to describe the helping methods used by psychiatric nurses in a hospital environment from as evidenced by video observations and nurses' and patients' descriptions. The data, which were collected by videotaping different nursing situations and by interviewing the nurses and patients afterwards, consisted of 520 pages of written text. A total of 569 utterances were extracted from the text to describe the helping methods used in psychiatric nursing. Each utterance constituted a classification unit. Deductive content analysis techniques were used to analyze the data. The results obtained from the nurses' and patients' descriptions and the videotaped episodes showed that the most commonly used helping methods were of the confirmatory kind (50%), while educational methods came second (37%) and catalytic methods third (13%).