Occupational Therapy and Life Course Development: A Work Book for Professional Practice - Softcover

Wright, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 047002545X ISBN 13: 9780470025451

Verlag: JW, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Occupational Therapy and Life Course Development is an invaluable work book for professional practice. It provides a tool to help both students and qualified professionals develop and enhance a framework for their practice that supports all individuals and settings in a holistic and inclusive way.

Much of the book is organised as a work book based around a single case study.  It includes theory related to life span development and managing change, and also exercises for readers to complete in order to apply the theory to practice.

Chapters span such key topics as the client in context; life events; transition and loss; the management of stress; and planful decision making.

The book emphasises how issues of life course development are as relevant to health and social care professionals as they are to their clients.  A number of exercises invite readers to reflect on their own life course, and there chapters both on becoming and belonging as an occupational therapist, and on developing professional practice.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruth Wright is at the Occupational Therapy Department, St Martin's College, Lancaster.

Leonie Sugarman is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and is Senior Lecturer in?the Department of Applied Social Sciences, St Martin's College, Lancaster.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Occupational Therapy and Life Course Development

A work book for Professional Practice in Health and Social CareBy Ruth Wright Leoni Sugarman

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2006 Ruth Wright and Leoni Sugarman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-02545-1

Chapter One

The Life Course as an Organizing Framework

Whoever your clients are, one thing we can be sure of is that they will be somewhere on the path from cradle to grave, and that where they are in this journey is going to affect their needs. To have an understanding of this journey through the life course, and to be able to use the theories that describe and explain it in order to organize and enhance your interventions, can only be helpful. This chapter introduces the idea of the life course as an organizing framework for thinking about clients' lives. It presents a number of theoretical ideas and practical tools.

By 'the life course' (Cohler & Hostetler, 2003; Elder et al., 2003), we mean the rhythmic and fluctuating pattern of human life over time, marked out by expected and unexpected life events and interactions between the self and the environment. It covers the journey through life from start to finish, including all the stages, roles and key events that the person experiences, along with the reactions of the person to these experiences and the meanings which they attach to them. To adopt a life course framework is not to adhere to a particular, well-defined theory. Instead, it is to take on a world view or perspective that posits an active and agentic individual interacting with and moving through an influential and modifiable physical and interpersonal environment (McAdams, 1993). The specifics of what this means are spelt out in less abstract terms in Box 1.1, and can be thought of as a manifesto for the life course (or lifespan) perspective. You should look at these statements before reading on, and reflect on the questions posed.

For each and every one of us, the life course is a fascinating and complex personal journey, and for those of us who work therapeutically with others it provides a robust framework that helps divide complicated concepts into smaller, logically related and more manageable chunks (Pickin & St Leger, 1993). It can be used as an aide-memoire for health and social care professionals' assessment of client needs, and as a tool for the planning and evaluation of interventions.

Roles across the life course

Client-centred intervention includes the belief that meaningful activity both contributes to and is a source of personal well-being; and occupational therapy is specifically grounded in this belief. A life course perspective locates this and, indeed, all activity in the context of one or more social roles, for example the role of worker, parent, student or, possibly for many of your clients, patient. Turn now to Learning Task 1.1, which will help you begin to build up a picture of the lives of the participants in our case study (pp. 6-11).

Learning Task 1.1 introduces the idea of a person's roles varying across the life course, at least in part dependent on his or her life stage. This can be represented diagrammatically as a life-career rainbow. Donald Super (1980; Herr, 1997), the psychologist who introduced this idea, identified nine roles that together are able to account for most of the roles occupied by most people most of the time: child, student, leisure user, citizen, worker, partner/spouse, homemaker, parent and retiree. Of course, for any particular individual some of these roles may be absent (not everyone is a spouse, for example) or insignificant (there are those for whom studentship comes to an end early in life, has never had much meaning and is never resumed later in life). Similarly, for some people, roles that do not figure in Super's list (for example sibling, client or patient) may be of prime importance. Super identifies four key arenas in which these roles are acted out: home, work, school (or other educational establishment) and community. These are all important parts of the environment or context in which most, although of course not all, individuals live out their lives.

Key issues for occupational therapists and other health and social care practitioners relate to the number, size, nature and personal significance of the constellation of roles that comprise a client's life-career rainbow. Do they represent a good role balance? Are there any significant gaps? Are any roles too demanding for the client? What changes may be indicated in order to further a client's well-being or progress?

The life-career rainbow can indicate more than mere role occupancy. Thus, the width of each band can be varied in line with the time demands of a particular role. Immediately after the birth of a first child, parents may find that the 'parent' role occupies almost all hours of the day (and night), with other roles being compressed into small windows of time, or else dropped altogether. After a while, however, the time demands of the role lessen somewhat, and a more balanced and varied role repertoire can be attained. Illness and disability can likewise disrupt a person's role balance, with hitherto important roles being squeezed out of a person's life. As an occupational therapist, you are uniquely placed to address these issues and to work with your clients using the concept of the life-career rainbow to help them to address their needs. It may, in fact, be helpful to spend some time constructing and talking through your client's life-career rainbow quite formally, using the technique of drawing one out as a basis for mutual planning and agreement about goals, aims and interventions. Box 1.2 uses the idea of a life-career rainbow to depict the life course to date of Katie, one of the case study characters.

In thinking about a person's life-career rainbow, it is vital to note that of possibly even greater significance than the time demands of a particular role is its importance or meaning (or salience, to use Super's term). In terms of the life-career rainbow, this could be conveyed by varying the density of the colouring in each band. The colour density of any one role can then vary as the role waxes and wanes in significance. This, even more than the occupancy or not of particular roles, can be highly individual and idiosyncratic, making it risky for health and social care workers to make assumptions about the relative significance of a client's various roles. Hence, role saliency is not depicted in the life-career rainbow for Katie. Whilst we may be able to hazard a guess at the saliency for her of some of her roles, at least at some points in her life course, this is really for her to decide. Rather than being assumed, role saliency is something that should be explored with clients as part of the assessment process. The ideal scenario, of course, is when those roles represented by a wide band (that is time-consuming ones) have a good degree of colour density (thereby indicating significant salience to the individual). It may be salutary for us to realize how large a part of a person's life the client role may at times occupy. We need to consider how we can ensure that clients experience our interactions as meaningful as well as time-consuming. Clients, like everyone else, are vulnerable to stress and depression as a consequence of performing roles that occupy a great deal of time but have little salience for them. This is particularly true when those roles last for long periods, and even more so when there appears to be...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: JW
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 047002545X
• ISBN 13: 9780470025451
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland