THE SHINING STRANGER: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE NURSE-FAMILY SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIP.
Contributors: University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
Published: 1988
Number of pages: 272
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: The spiritual dimension is an integral concept in humanistic nursing care and can be an important healing domain, yet it has received little attention in nursing practice, research, and theory development. Consequently, nurses lack theories to guide practice in the spiritual domain. Patients' and families' unmet needs for relatedness to others and to The Absolute can result in feelings of alienation, and for the terminally ill, feelings of loneliness and isolation when the most need support and compassion. This research and nursing model contributed to knowledge and understanding of the spiritual dimension of nursing.

The research question guiding this investigation was, What is the meaning of the nurse-family spiritual relationship? Phenomenology was selected as the methodology because it seeks to describe experience-as-lived by the participants. A purposive convenience sample of participants, drawn from an urban hospice program, consisted of eleven nurses, and nine families in bereavement. Data were generated from transcripts of tape recorded interviews with participants.

Phenomenological analysis and interpretation of the data were accomplished. Five thematic structures of experience emerged: Nurses' Ways of Being; Nurses' Ways of Doing; Nurses' Ways of Knowing; Ways of Receiving and Giving; and Ways of Welcoming a Stranger. The unity of meaning of the nurse-family spiritual relationship was intuited as The Shining Stranger. The context for the relationship was families' suffering and nurses' compassion and knowledgeable caring; and a metaunity of meaning of the I-Thou-Grace relationship was synthesized.

From a review of select Eastern and Western religious literature, exemplars and a characterization of the Shining Stranger were developed which illuminated an ideal of spiritual relationship. Guided by the Shining Stranger metaphor, Whitehead's philosophy and theoretical physics, a model of the I-Thou-Grace Spiritual Relationship was developed. The researcher concluded that nurses were Shining Strangers to families and families were Shining Strangers to nurses. The nurse-family spiritual relationship was mutual and dialogic, offering the opportunity for continuing spiritual growth.

Implications for nursing knowledge, practice, education, research, and theory development as well as recommendations for further inquiry were presented.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-10, Section: B, page: 4236.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER, 1988.

School code: 0831.