DANCING WITH CONFLICT: PUBLIC HEALTH NURSES IN PARTICIPATORY ACTION-RESEARCH.
Contributors: University of Calgary.
Published: 1995
Number of pages: 317
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Women's Studies.
Description: When people believe in something, something that can make them more fully human, they can make it come true. This ultimately is the reason for participatory action-research (PAR). Driven by their common need, a group of people search for and create a path of inquiry and movement. Engagement in PAR, a human and spiritual science, is an encounter with reality and with possibility: participation can shift people's inner consciousness, their perceptions of powers-within-life, and their abilities to take astute actions.

Over fifteen months with three major phases, all the public health nurses (PHNs) working in a health unit in Alberta entered into an open-ended and self-reflective process to examine their experiences of health care practice. Using Freireian codes based on generative themes to stimulate dialogue, the nurses' first action was to pause and reflect--an important consideration given their "rushing" culture in a hierarchical bureaucracy focussed on tasks, efficiency and outputs. The relief of reflection allowed most participants to "loosen" and then "rupture" their previous patterns of interaction and their perceptions of themselves as powerless, conforming employees who were characterized by anxiety, fatigue, passive reactivity, weak group consciousness, and an inability to articulate their identity and purpose.

Experiencing freedom and participation while dealing with disorienting questions and activities, the nurses "saw" their oppressive circumstances with more distanced eyes and "saw themselves" anew as people who had submitted to, and were now expelling, internal invisible oppressors. Liberating movement that increased inner power and self-esteem occurred when participants: practiced an ideal vision of shared democratic power and humanizing interactions; gained symbols and new language for naming existing patterns and the desired alternatives; built up critical capacity; took deliberate actions; and strengthened trusting relationships by listening to each other and legitimizing feelings in a safe climate, by taking responsibility for decisions and actions, and by recognizing conflict.

Our work also demonstrated: the need to integrate the six ways of knowing; the distinction between relational and tension dialectics; the establishment of validity in PAR; and the framing of PAR methodology (praxiology) as spiralling moments of lived experience.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-01, Section: B, page: 0245.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY (CANADA), 1995.

School code: 0026.