NURSING AND HEALTH PROMOTION: CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THE GOALS OF THE PROFESSION AND ITS MODEL OF HEALTH PROMOTION.
Contributors: University of Delaware.
Published: 1987
Number of pages: 325
Subjects: Sociology, Public and Social Welfare.
Description: This dissertation studied health promotion and the profession of nursing in the United States. The analytic framework constructed to organize the study consists of two models of health promotion, atomistic and totalistic, grounded in ideologies of political economy. The models are presented as ideal types that evolve from fundamental differences in beliefs about humans. Construction of the models provided a basis for making explicit the different possibilities for population health that flow from each. The atomistic model is assessed as being both incomplete and discriminatory for gender, race, and class in its health promotion policies.

To obtain evidence about the position of nursing regarding health promotion, a content analysis of a set of professional literature was conducted. The content obtained was analyzed by comparing the ideas and assumptions expressed in the articles with the analytic, causal, accountability, and intervention assumptions specified for the two models. It was found, by this process, that the atomistic model of health promotion embodies the nursing profession's ideology of health promotion. Given that the results attributed to the atomistic model are counter to articulated goals of the profession of nursing, it was necessary to construct an explanation to account for the apparent paradox of the findings.

An explanation for this contradiction was offered that attributed atomistic thinking about health promotion in nursing to the consciousness-structuring effects of the professional and economic subordination of nursing, subordination both made possible by and supportive of the cultural position of women in a capitalist patriarchal social system. It was concluded that for nurses to implement the totalistic health promotion model, they would have to confront the matter of their own subordination. Instructed by this consciousness, nursing must work simultaneously for short-term changes in health promotion and longer term social transformation if a fully totalistic health policy and professional self-determination are to be achieved.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-06, Section: A, page: 1551.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, 1987.

School code: 0060.