Professional Socialisation and Identity Formation in Rural Health Education

The study offers a critical theoretical consideration of underlying perspectives informing rural health education in an undergraduate nursing, medical and pharmacy program. A new research approach was developed and tested for examining the effects of different individuals and groups (from academics to rural health practitioners to undergraduate nursing, medical and pharmacy students) using different patterns of language in the socialising process of rural health education. The thesis describes and demonstrates the use of critical discourse analysis as a means of facilitating critical awareness and stimulating research practice focussing on rural health education. Critical discourse analysis applies to a range of semiotic methods for examining text, such as natural instances of written and spoken language, with the objective of gaining insights into the meanings of a text and what it signifies. Emphasis is placed on the way individuals and groups use language, where texts construct the social world and influence the way identity is formed.