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Postcolonial feminist theories provide the analytic tools to address issues of structural inequities in groups that historically have been socially and economically disadvantaged. In this paper we question what value might be added to postcolonial feminist theories on culture by drawing on Bourdieu. Are there points of connection? Like postcolonial feminists, he puts forward a position that aims to unmask oppressive structures. We argue that, while there are points of connection, there are also epistemologic and methodologic differences between postcolonial feminist perspectives and Bourdieu's work. Nonetheless, engagement with different theoretical perspectives carries the promise of new insights - new ways of 'seeing' and 'understanding' that might enhance a praxis-oriented theoretical perspective in healthcare delivery.

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Based on an action theory approach, 32 videotaped parent-adolescent conversations about health in two Canadian ethno-cultural groups were analyzed to identify and describe the joint action of parents and adolescents in the health domain. The data include manifest behavior (the conversation), internal processes (recalled thoughts and feelings on viewing the videotape of the conversation), and social meaning. These data were analyzed using the goals, functions, and elements of the conversations. Five categories of joint actions emerged from these data: sharing and exploring information, values, and beliefs about health; negotiating and struggling about aspects of the adolescent's independence; providing and receiving guidance; adjusting to family and home issues; and fostering joint understanding by giving voice to the adolescent.

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Although many health concerns of women in India differ from those of Indian women in Canada, both groups of women have a high incidence of low birthweight babies. The question of how best to improve the health status of pregnant Indo-Canadian women and consequently improve pregnancy outcomes is a complex one. It involves the availability and allocation of financial and human resources, the integration of Indian cultural beliefs and attitudes with Western biomedical knowledge, the status of women in Indian culture, and Canadian social and economic issues such as demographic changes, changes in the role of the family, government policies, economic restructuring and so on.

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The concept of the family health-promotion project is introduced as a means of describing and analysing health-promoting processes in a family. We suggest that an action-theoretical conceptualization provides a language for dealing with socially embedded human behaviour. The levels of project organization are described and the issues discussed are: hierarchical organization, communication, goal structure, steering, control, regulation, energizing, perspectives and construction, group or joint action, three-dimensional structure of group action, dual enfolding of group actions, properties of group action and of family projects. The research design and methods of a current study on a family health-promotion project are presented and explained.

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Families, and the support they provide, are one of the most important resources of the informal health care delivery system. As nurses we are called upon to enable clients to maximize their use of family resources and to enable families to cope with illness-related events. While research has clearly documented the important role of support in enabling persons to cope effectively with illnesses and illness-related events, further research to understand the processes of providing support within families has been called for. With such information we may be more effective in our efforts to guide and support families as they cope with illness in a family member. This paper was developed from a qualitative study with young adults with cancer that examined social relationships in order to understand the nature of interactions perceived as supportive and the context within which they occurred. In-depth interviews conducted with young adults provided detailed data regarding the nature of support young adults received from and offered to their families in order to maintain family functioning. The processes of offering and receiving support have been conceptualized into five categories of 'family work'. The nature of the work is described and the roles of family members in accomplishing the work are addressed. The findings are discussed in relation to current issues in practice.

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Increasingly, families are being called to provide care to their elderly family members. Nursing has an important role to play in enabling families to assume such responsibilities. In this article, however, it is argued that nursing needs to examine its goals for nursing care and approaches to care delivery in their broader social, political, and economic context. Marxist theory is introduced and used to raise questions about taken-for-granted aspects of nursing practice and trends in health policy as they relate to family carers for the elderly. The article specifically examines assumptions about family, women, and household economies that are inherent in traditional nursing theory. It is argued that nursing needs to move its focus of action beyond work at the individual and family level to include work at system and policy levels. To do so, nursing must examine theoretical perspectives that enable such an inquiry into practice.

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Nursing has, in recent years, strongly argued that an individual's culture influences how illness events are perceived and managed. Nursing has also identified the need for nurses to provide culturally sensitive care. The literature, however, provides very limited direction for the integration of such concepts into nursing curricula. In this paper, the author presents a theoretical perspective on culture that addresses cultural beliefs and values but also extends to consider caring and programmes of care delivery within the broader social context. Using examples from the literature, the author identifies knowledge and skills deemed essential if nurses are to be capable of working effectively with individual clients and at the level of programme design and delivery.

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The intent of this paper is to provide nurses with a way of viewing and working with cultural differences of their clients. A second goal is to make such information relevant to nurses caring for patients with cardiovascular diseases. Using nursing and social science literature the author defines culturally sensitive care and identifies concepts basic to the provision of such care. Drawing upon interviews with nurses working in a variety of cardiovascular settings a perspective on how culturally sensitive care can be provided is presented.

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It is generally agreed that promoting effective communication in families is a desirable goal for health professionals. Many nurses are consulted by families for direction in managing a multitude of issues. A paucity of literature addressing both adolescent communication and communication in families with adolescents, prompted us to embark upon a programme of research which has examined how adolescents expand their abilities to communicate and explored how adolescents and their families perceive communication within their family. This paper reports on a qualitative study that explored through serial in-depth interviews, parents' and teenagers' perceptions of communication in their families. The conceptualization developed from the study data characterizes communication as a tool used by families. The families' abilities to use the tool effectively, however, is greatly influenced by feelings about the topic or issue under discussion. A major theme in our data is adolescent independence. What this means for parents and adolescents and how this developmental task influences the communication patterns used within the families is discussed.

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Women with young children who were immigrants to Canada were interviewed to understand how they defined their needs and what resources they perceived to be available to meet their needs. All of the women described a need to feel as if they belonged in Canada and had people to turn to for personal support. The women identified general groups of people they perceived as able to provide them with differing forms of support. The three groups were labelled; kin, insider and outsider. The women also described how they used the sources of support and the feelings which resulted from their interactions with members of the support groups. The conceptualization which was developed from the data suggests women may follow a pathway in developing a support network. How this information might be used by health professionals in clinical practice is discussed.

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