What is it about?
Relatives of people living in nursing homes are usually described through what they do: visiting, advocating, making decisions. This study asked a different question: what does it feel like to be a relative inside an institution that shapes nearly everything about a loved one's daily life? Across 30 everyday encounters in two Swiss nursing homes, we combined three data sources for each encounter: structured observations, walking interviews with nursing professionals, and follow-up conversations with relatives. We called this approach the Integrated Encounter Analysis. Instead of trying to reconcile the three views into one, we treated their differences as analytically productive, letting divergence between perspectives make visible what any single perspective would miss. We found that being relative in institutional long-term care is not primarily a role. It is a threshold position: present but not staff, close but not at home, involved but not in charge. This threshold existence unfolds across eight constitutive dimensions organised into three interconnected areas: the situational, the relational, and the spatial-temporal. Relatives continuously move between poles of institutional determination and quiet agency, sometimes within a single visit.
Featured Image
Photo by zhang shuaizhang on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Person-centred care in long-term care has focused on residents and, increasingly, on staff. Relatives have often been included only through what they contribute functionally: visits, information, decisions. This framing misses the existential dimension of their presence. This paper matters for three reasons. First, it introduces a new conceptual vocabulary for something practitioners in long-term care have long sensed but rarely named: the ontological condition of being relative inside an institution. Second, it develops the Integrated Encounter Analysis as a methodological approach for qualitative researchers who work with multiple perspectives on the same event and want to preserve their divergence rather than resolve it. Third, it turns the analysis into practical directions: recognising the presence of thresholds as legitimate, taking spatial recognition seriously, and moving beyond binary categories of "involved" and "uninvolved" family. For everyone working with families in long-term care settings, this paper offers a vocabulary for what happens in the corridors, doorways, and quiet moments that shape the experience of being a relative.
Perspectives
This paper is part of a broader research programme called BE-REAL, which explores what it means to be relative inside residential long-term care. As an Advanced Practice Nurse working in long-term care, I have watched countless small moments in doorways and corridors: relatives waiting to be acknowledged, hovering at the edge of a care situation, unsure whether their presence was welcome or in the way. What started as an ethnographic curiosity became a conceptual argument. If we frame relatives only in terms of what they do, we keep missing what they need. Recognising the threshold as a legitimate position, rather than as awkwardness or indecision, opens up a very different conversation about presence, space, and time in institutional care. The Integrated Encounter Analysis grew out of a methodological question that surprised me during fieldwork: what if the difference between how a nursing professional and a relative remembered the same encounter is not a methodological problem but the finding itself? Holding those divergent voices together, without letting one override the other, changed what I could see.
Rouven Brenner
Eastern Switzerland, University of Applied Sciences, School of Health, St. Gallen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Towards a Multidimensional Understanding of “Being Relative” in Residential Long-Term Care: Findings From a Qualitative Multiperspective Study, Global Qualitative Nursing Research, June 2026, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/23333936261454128.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
