PURPOSE: This study was carried out to identify and re-establish the professional identity in clinical nurses. METHOD: From Dec. 1999, for 4 months, the study had been conducted by narrative analysis method based on hermeneutic principles. Subjects were ten nurses with 3-4 years of nursing experience at a university hospital. The data were collected and transcribed through narrative interviews. RESULT: As a result, the maternal role was identified as the most dominant discourse in which nurses formed their identity. Subjects felt that a maternity is socio-culturally needed in case of nursing. Reconstruction of professional identity consists of 3 stages, Telling, Retelling and Rebuilding. At first, nurses felt confused by skeptism of the profession, interpersonal difficulties, and heavy work loads. However, during the interviews, nurses recognized that nursing is not regarded as significant, effort to make nursing meaningful were small, and there was a lack of understanding others. From this new insight, they re-established a new image of nursing "through better understanding of others, seeking knowledge, and making positive efforts towards qualified nursing". CONCLUSION: The above narrative interviews may help nurses reflect and contextually interpret themselves, so that a new identity could be established. Furthermore researchers can obtain new insight from the subjects, while the subjects form a new nursing image from self-reflection.

This study was done to investigate the lives of the daughters- in- law caring for parents with dementia and participate in their lives through having quality time with them. Data were collected by depth interviews and interpreted through the hermeneutic circle as follows. These daughters-in-law have conflict between social custom and subjective self. They had ambivalence toward their demented partents-in- law and were fighting a battle between rationality and emotions in their mind. These daughters-in law and mothers-in- law did not get along and the parents' dementia aggravated the relationships. They were alienated from their family by the parents with dementia. The indifference of their family especially their husbands, made these subjects live in misery. They cared for the demented mother-in-law with hatred. Even though they had this yoke, there daughters- in-law were not able to throw off the shackles of convention.