The nurses stated that the care culture is a reality,
without saying what it is, but instead how they experienced
it. The structural analysis presents five themes, all of
which were derived from the meaning and significance of
the nurses’ experiences. These themes are different in
meaning, and as Ehn and Lo¨ fgren (2001) pointed out, it is
not enough to schematically describe what culture people
belong to in an explanatory model. Culture itself is an
explanatory model, and there will never be a concrete
explanation as to why people think and react as they do.
Instead, culture is a good concept to describe meaning and
understanding, not to make things uniform, but instead to
emphasize complexity and conflicts and at the same time
disclose patterns and points of agreement. According to
Geertz (1973), understanding culture entails making a
‘‘thick description’’, and an interpretation of an interpretation.
It is impossible to derive any absolute factual
conclusions, but essential to engage in a search for
inherent meaning.