Cultural and religious structures influencing the use of maternal health services in Nigeria: a focused ethnographic research.

Background: Cultural and religious structures encompass a set pattern of values, beliefs, systems and practices that define a community's behaviour and identity. These structures influence women's health-seeking behaviour and access to maternal health services, predisposing women to preventable maternal health complications. However, most maternal health policies have focused on biomedical strategies, with limited attention to women's cultural challenges around childbirth.

Facilitating and limiting factors of cultural norms influencing use of maternal health services in primary health care facilities in Kogi State, Nigeria; a focused ethnographic research on Igala women.

Background: Facilitating factors are potential factors that encourage the uptake of maternal health services, while limiting factors are those potential factors that limit women's access to maternal health services. Though cultural norms or values are significant factors that influence health-seeking behaviour, there is a limited exploration of the facilitating and limiting factors of these cultural norms and values on the use of maternal health services in primary health care facilities.

Aim: To understand the facilitating and limiting factors of cultural values and norms that influence the use of maternal health services in primary healthcare facilities.

A Critical Comparison of Focused Ethnography and Interpretive Phenomenology in Nursing Research.

Choosing an appropriate qualitative methodology in nursing research is a researcher's first step before beginning a study. Such a step is critical as the selected qualitative methodology should be congruent with the research questions, study assumptions, data gathering and analysis to promote the utility of such research in enhancing nursing knowledge. In this paper, we compare focused ethnography by Roper and Shapira and interpretive phenomenology by Benner.