THE STRUCTURE OF THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF STRUGGLING WITH MAKING A DECISION IN A CRITICAL LIFE SITUATION, FOR A GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS WITH HIV (MAN-LIVING-HEALTH RESEARCH METHODOLOGY).
Contributors: University of Miami.
Published: 1990
Number of pages: 115
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: The purposes of this study were to generate a structure of the lived experience of struggling to make a decision in a critical life situation for a group of individuals with HIV and to test the emerging Man-Living-Health Research Methodology. The generated structure of the lived experience provides nurses in practice and research with a scientific understanding of the phenomenon from a Man-Living-Health perspective, as well as a view of a lived experience of health from the vantage of those who live it.

The processes of the Man-Living-Health Research Methodology were strictly adhered to in conducting the study. They are: participant selection, dialogical engagement, extraction-synthesis and heuristic interpretation. Ten men, with HIV, between the ages of twenty-four and fifty-six, agreed to participate in the study. The dialogical engagements took place in settings agreed upon by the researcher and participant. Each dialogical engagement was audio-recorded, and then transcribed to typed text. The researcher dwelled with the typed transcript and audio-recording of each participant in the process of extraction-synthesis. From this process a proposition emerged from each participant's description of the phenomenon; from these propositions core concepts were extracted. The structure that emerged from this process is: Struggling to make a decision in a critical life situation is affirming self through confronting uncertainty in moving toward the not-yet, while risking disclosing self with important others, as vascillating between options unfolds in visions of the what might be in light of what was and is. The structure was then heuristicly interpretated.

The significance of the timing of this study is two-fold. Firstly, the theory of Man-Living-Health emerges from a new paradigm in nursing science that provides evolutionary and revolutionary methodologies of practice and research at a time in the discipline's development when such advances are necessary. Secondly, HIV has been described as one of the greatest contemporary health challenges.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-06, Section: B, page: 2815.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI, 1990.

School code: 0125.