Project Overview
This project focused on mapping how the general narrative about mental health is evolving, as we are witnessing a change in attitudes, perspectives and discourses on this topic. Therefore, this study examined what master narratives on mental health exist and captured the changing emphasis in these narratives over time.
Data and Data Collection Overview
A triangulation approach was used to gather data on evolving narratives via a scoping review, semi-structured interviews, and review of a podcast series consisting of interviews with changemakers in Dutch mental healthcare.
For the scoping review, search terms relevant to the research question and areas of interest for this study were generated and used to search in SCOPUS, WorldCat and PubMed on August 4, 2023. 759 (excluding duplicates) number of articles were found initially. The titles and abstracts were further screened based on the inclusion criteria of full text availability, describing narratives on mental health (i.e., discourses, attitudes, perspectives or other expressions of narratives on mental health), written in Dutch or English, and published after 2018 to gather contemporary views. The final number of articles analyzed was 33.
Eleven semi-structured interviews were conducted at the University Medical Centre Utrecht (UMCU). The interviewees had varying roles in the mental healthcare system. Nine of them were recruited at the UMCU and two were recruited from a broader professional network. Interviews took 60-90 minutes and started with verbal informed consent.
To broaden understanding and to ensure professional perspectives which were not only UMCU-specific, all 11 episodes from the podcast ‘Hoe de GGZ verandert’ (How mental healthcare is changing; https://podcastluisteren.nl/pod/Hoe-de-GGZ-verandert?refresh=1#/) created in 2020 were also included in the analysis. Data were extracted from the episodes via relistening, noting down timestamps of relevant fragments, and transcribing these portions verbatim.
The podcast and interview texts are in the original Dutch and were coded in English by the bilingual researchers without conducting translation. Most of the literature analyzed was originally published in English. Thus, the data excerpts included are in both languages depending on source.
The texts from all three data sources were analyzed in the same manner, using inductive thematic analysis and selective coding. Open coding of the full-text articles, podcast interviews and semi-structured interview transcripts was performed to identify text units that refer to master narratives on mental health. Axial coding was conducted by iteratively clustering codes into themes. All text units resulting from the thematic analysis were also deductively coded with respect to the timeframe they represented (past, present, future).
Selection and Organization of Shared Data
The data file shared here consists of a combined spreadsheet with coded excerpts from all three data sources (selected scholarly literature, individual interview transcripts and podcast transcript). The excerpts are organized by source type in separate tabs of the spreadsheet, as well as combined all together by theme in a separate tab (labeled “Coding”). There is an additional tab (labeled “Codes”), which lists all four master narratives, their constituent themes and the topics which were identified as part of each theme, alongside frequencies for each of them across all analyzed texts.
The documentation files shared consist of the questionnaire used for the individual interviews, this Data Narrative and an administrative README file. |
