NEGOTIATED MEANING OF HEALTH: A TRANSACTIONAL PERSPECTIVE BASED IN CONSTRUCT THEORY (NURSING, COMMUNICATION THEORY, PHILOSOPHY).
Contributors: Ohio State University.
Published: 1985
Number of pages: 198
Subjects: Speech Communication.
Description: Health is approached as a negentropic unfolding phenomenon with expanding and enlarging meanings rooted in a mechanical, reductionistic world view dating back to Descartes as well as in an emerging view described as self-actualizing or implicate. The simultaneity of these views is in an important dimension of this inquiry for it is out of the full range of meanings for health reflected in the shifting perspectives that individual constructions of health emerge. Health is the living of value priorities. This research is an attempt to catch the direction and flow of the changing meanings for health for individuals and to compare and contrast how individuals are alike and how they are different in their construing of health.

Students enrolled in a baccalaureate program in nursing participated in negotiating the meaning of health through oral discussions and written work. This culminated in the formulation of an eighty item Q-Sort and was guided by Monaghan's "Principles on the Negotiation of Meaning." Specifically, the principles relating to active, integrated and empathic were incorporated into a Health Communication Model. The individual participants were the variables and the item statements were the observations. Correlation matrices for the conditions "as I am now" and "as I want to become" were computed using the Pearson Product Moment formula and became the basis for clustering the participants into naturally emerging clusters. The clustering procedure employed was based in McQuitty's method.

Each participant operationalized his/her meaning of health by completing the Q-Sort for the present and for the ideal. Five actual and two ideal types emerged from the data and reflect how the participants construe health. A prototype was developed for each cluster type in the form of rank order item arrays of those items which were most and least characteristic for the type. The types are composed of persons who have similar views or meanings for health. The actual types are Health Possessors, Harmony Seekers, Potential Seekers, Transcenders, and Shaped-by-the-Past. The ideal types are described as Growth Seekers and Bounded Growth individuals.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-09, Section: A, page: 2482.

Thesis (PH.D.)--THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, 1985.

School code: 0168.