RESPONSES OF INSTITUTIONALIZED OLDER ADULTS TO URINARY INCONTINENCE: MANAGING THE FLOW.
Contributors: University of Pennsylvania.
Published: 1995
Number of pages: 173
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Gerontology.
Description: The purpose of this study was to develop a substantive theory to describe and explain human responses to urinary incontinence (UI) among older adults who reside in nursing homes. Ten residents (age range = 69-93) of three nursing homes served as primary participants, providing one in-depth formal interview, repeated informal interviews, participant observation experiences, and access to their health care records. Another 33 individual residents and five groups of residents served as secondary participants, providing informal interviews and participant observation experiences. Using Grounded Theory methodology, data were concurrently obtained and analyzed over a seventeen-month period.

Two distinct responses to UI were discovered in the data: making the best of it and suffering with it. Both are consequences of the core category, MANAGING THE FLOW. As the main theme in the data, MANAGING THE FLOW explained response to UI as a function of perceived impact and management of UI by the older adult residing in a nursing home. Older adults use six strategies to MANAGE THE FLOW: limiting, improvising, learning, monitoring, speaking up, and letting it go. These strategies are pursued in the interest of protecting physical, psychological, and social integrity within the nursing home, and in the context of believing that UI is inevitable and difficult, if not impossible, to treat.

This study suggests that the process by which institutionalized older adults respond to UI is similar to that observed among community-dwelling elderly, and congruent with major concepts and principles of the Roy Adaptation Model. Implications for clinical practice, education, and research are cited.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-05, Section: B, page: 2563.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1995.

School code: 0175.