Abstract

The nature of power experienced by individuals labeled 'chronic schizophrenic' was ascertained through hermeneutic analysis and further validated through multiple triangulation. The central themes that emerged from text were integrality and awareness. The structure of power to respondents was determined to involve integrality and awareness in addition to a wide range of themes regarding choices, freedom to act intentionally, and involvement in creating changes, field behaviors identified by Barrett (1983) as constituting power. Informants who viewed their integrality as a process, who recognized the advantages and limitations imposed by living in the world, and who made choices with regard to others and did so freely were more powerful than those informants who viewed integrality as a product, who did not recognize the nature of the context in which they live, and whose choices were more limited to things they did for themselves in order to get along. None of the informants in the study was able to clearly describe the nature of his or her involvement in creating changes. Neither did assumptions that structured informants' schizophrenia as an illness seem clear to them. Emergent implications for nursing include nurses' recognition of nursing's own contextually-grounded evolution; transcendence of the prevailing world-view in description of schizophrenic experience; and acceptance of schizophrenic experience as evolutionary rather than regressive.

Description

This dissertation has also been disseminated through the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. Dissertation/thesis number: 8701004; ProQuest document ID: 303455506. The author still retains copyright.

Author Details

Laura Cox Dzurec, PhD

Sigma Membership

Eta Beta

Type

Dissertation

Format Type

Text-based Document

Study Design/Type

Phenomenology

Research Approach

Qualitative Research

Keywords:

Schizophrenic Persons, Mental Health Nursing, Experience of Schizophrenia

Advisor

Violet M. Malinski

Degree

PhD

Degree Grantor

Case Western Reserve University

Degree Year

1986

Rights Holder

All rights reserved by the author(s) and/or publisher(s) listed in this item record unless relinquished in whole or part by a rights notation or a Creative Commons License present in this item record.

All permission requests should be directed accordingly and not to the Sigma Repository.

All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.

Review Type

None: Degree-based Submission

Acquisition

Proxy-submission

Date of Issue

2019-03-01

Full Text of Presentation

wf_yes

Download

Share

COinS