POWER AND IMAGES OF NURSING IN THE LIVED WORLDS OF NURSE ADMINISTRATORS.
Contributors: University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
Published: 1987
Number of pages: 307
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: The question which guided this research was: What is the meaning of power and images of nursing as experienced by nurse administrators in their everyday work worlds? Phenomenology was used as the method to explore the meaning of the phenomena. Nurse administrators were interviewed using unstructured, open ended interviewing techniques. Middle managers in nursing and chief nurse administrators, both male and female were included in the study. Interviews were audio taped and transcribed such that analysis could be assisted through The Ethnograph, a computer program designed for managing qualitative data.

By reflection on the data, themes were identified, culminating in the disclosure of the unity of meaning. A summarized statement of the Unity of Meaning was that the quality of the relationship of the particular selves of nurse administrators and other participants in the relationship defined how power came to be for those participants. Through continued reflection, analysis, and interpretation, a theory of how power comes to be in relationships was generated. Power emerges in relationships as either overpowering or empowering through processes of imaging, defining, allowing, and communicating. Empowering is associated with caring, valuing and respecting the other in relationships, while overpowering is associated with depersonalizing/objectifying, devaluing, and diminishing the other. Based on how power comes to be in the relationship, nurse administrators choose to either fit into the existing situation, a choice associated with overpowering, or to fit together in cooperative modes of organizing, associated with empowering. Selves are expanded or constricted as these modes of powering emerge in relationships. Images and definitions of the situation change based on these experiences, and so the circle continues.

The significance of this study for nursing is that it assists nurses to understand the process of power development in relationships and the factors that influence that process. Based on understanding, nurses and others may choose modes of interacting which will help influence how power will evolve in their relationships with others in the work place.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-11, Section: B, page: 3247.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER, 1987.

School code: 0831.