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Biomedical subjects

L C Dzurec

Publications and source records attributed to L C Dzurec.

16 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Fatigue and relatedness experiences of inordinately tired women.

PURPOSE: To examine the association of fatigue and interpersonal relatedness of fatigued women. DESIGN: Hermeneutics. METHODS: Seventeen fatigued American women, recruited through purposive sampling, were interviewed. Questions were based on data from previous research of women's fatigue and on characteristics of the theory of relatedness. FINDINGS: Relatedness was significantly linked to fatigue. Participants moved toward disconnectedness, parallelism, comfortable noninvolvement, or through enmeshment and then toward parallelism. A spiral of intrapersonal and interpersonal changes, sense of emotional absence, lack of energy and motivation, and depression-like symptoms were reported by fatigued participants, particularly those whose state of relatedness shifted toward disconnectedness. Depression-like symptoms were associated with fatigue, but were differentiated from diagnosed depression. Participants noted that physical movement was helpful to them in mediating their fatigue. CONCLUSIONS: Findings from this study indicate the need for a database to describe the interplay among biological, psychosocial, and behavioral components of fatigue and to clarify its association with medical diagnoses, particularly depression.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Certainty, leaps of faith, and tradition: rethinking clinical interventions.

Clinical decision making requires that clinicians think quickly and in ways that will foster optimal, safe client care. Tradition influences clinical decision making, enhancing efficiency of resulting nursing action; however, since many decisions must be based on data that are either uncertain, incomplete, or indirect, clinicians are readily ensnared in processes involving potentially faulty logic associated with tradition. The author addresses the tenacity of tradition and then focuses on three processes--consensus formation, the grounding of certainty in inductive reasoning, and affirming the consequent--that have affected clinical decision making. For some recipients of care, tradition has had a substantial and invalid influence on their ability to access care.

Decision Making↗
PubMed1997

Experiences of fatigue and depression before and after low-dose 1-thyroxine supplementation in essentially euthyroid individuals.

Hypothyroidism is a relative state, long associated with fatigue and depression. Individuals may experience thyroid-related symptoms such as fatigue and depression before thyroid indices become abnormal. However, because of clinicians' diverse interpretations of appropriate circumstances for its use, low-dose, 1-thyroxine supplementation often is overlooked as a therapeutic agent for symptom treatment. The purpose of this exploratory, hermeneutic study was to describe euthyroid individuals' experiences of fatigue and depression before and after low-dose 1-thyroxine supplementation. For women participants, the collective influence of fatigue and depression prior to treatment interfered significantly with their day-to-day lives, despite their euthyroid status. For men, the influence of symptoms was far less substantial than for women. In general, participants responded favorably, both physically and emotionally, to low-dose 1-thyroxine supplementation. Furthermore, no participant experienced 1-thyroxine induced hyperthyroidism or untoward side effects attributable to 1-thyroxine. Further study of effects of 1-thyroxine on symptoms is needed.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

A hermeneutic analysis of the process of conducting clinical interviews.

1. Although no right way to interview exists, an interviewer should develop a comfortable, personal style. 2. Allowing an interview to follow its own course while remembering the overall interview agenda will contribute to quality of the data. 3. Interviewing skills are enhanced as the interviewer develops a personal style and becomes comfortable as a practitioner.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Schizophrenic clients' experiences of power: using hermeneutic analysis.

This hermeneutic study was conducted to describe the personal power experienced by 15 people with schizophrenia. Analysis revealed that the essence of power was integrality or connection with the environment. The extent of power was determined by personal awareness of integrality. Among all participants, the range of power was modest. Power for people with schizophrenia differs from power for people in general. The characteristic of power for people with schizophrenia may interfere with their ability to adapt to living in the community.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1993

The power of the name.

An integral part of any research study is the assignment of names to phenomena of interest. The linguistic nuances accompanying names are frequently neglected, with a resulting significant affect on nursing research and on the tenor of nursing knowledge. Concept analysis is an important strategy for surmounting the difficulties associated with the process of choosing and modifying names. Examples of the naming process in two areas of nursing research are used to illustrate the influence of concept analysis on the development of nursing knowledge.

Concept Formation↗
PubMed1993

The nature of inquiry: linking quantitative and qualitative research.

Views of research that dichotomize qualitative and quantitative methods and the paradigms in which they are couched reflect a limited interpretation of the process of inquiry. In this article, the authors propose that inquiry, regardless of the inquirer's chosen paradigm or method, is governed by six pursuits that integrate qualitative and quantitative research methods. Recognition of the synthetic nature of inquiry is essential to fuller explanation and understanding of questions and problems relevant to nursing.

Nursing Research↗
PubMed1993

Grant writing for qualitative research.

In order to broaden understanding of the quality of qualitative grant proposals, analysis of 19 summary statements from qualitative grant proposals was conducted. This analysis showed that reviewers determined quality of proposals in terms of four themes: scientific contribution of the research; conceptual framework guiding the work; methods; and knowledge, skills, and resources available to the proposal writers. Writers' responses to the evaluations were reflected in the theme: surviving the review. This analysis suggested that reviewers of qualitative proposals recognized salient issues and were able to respond in ways that writers perceived as helpful. Qualitative research proposals that are clearly written, internally consistent, meaningful and have potential impact for the discipline of nursing are well-received.

Competitive Bidding↗
PubMed1992

Involvement in productive activities and satisfaction with living situation among severely mentally disabled adults.

Eighty-three adults with severe mental disabilities participated in a study examining effects on life satisfaction of having nothing to do, receipt of a housing subsidy, and enrollment in an intensive case management program. The clients were divided into four groups receiving subsidized housing and intensive case management, subsidized housing and nonintensive case management, intensive case management and nonsubsidized housing, and nonintensive case management and nonsubsidized housing. Initially and at ten months, clients reported how much time they spent with nothing to do and their level of satisfaction with supported-living arrangements. A significant association was found between time spent with nothing to do and both satisfaction and change in satisfaction and between having a housing subsidy and satisfaction. Results suggest that getting clients involved in activities of their own choosing would result in much greater increases in satisfaction.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1990

How do they see themselves? Self-perception and functioning for people with chronic schizophrenia.

In a supervised living situation, 15 individuals whose physical health was considered stable and who had diagnoses of chronic schizophrenia expressed varying perceptions of their mental health. Most perceived themselves as mentally well. This is in opposition to findings reported by Estroff (1981) and Dzurec (1986) that suggested that clients with schizophrenia tended to have negative self-perceptions. The author posits that this positive self-perception might be a function of respondents' expressed satisfaction with their housing situation. This is an area in which ongoing research is being conducted (Bininger, 1989; Dzurec, 1989). Housing satisfaction is thought by some researchers to precede successful community adaptation for the severely mentally disabled (Blanch, 1988). Respondents' perceptions of their mental health, as expressed in response to the interview protocol, appeared to be couched within primarily mundane, day to day issues. This finding is consistent with Estroff's conclusion that clients "seemed to have less control of their time, space, resources, and information than did outside and inside normals" (Estroff, 1981). The respondents gave themselves higher than average scores (ie, 3 or above on a five-point scale) overall on the PES, an instrument that measured aspects of their daily functioning. Their caretakers gave them somewhat lower overall scores on the PES. There was a moderate association between individual pairs of respondent-caretaker scores on the PES. Personal mental health perception did not appear to influence daily functioning.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1989

The necessity for and evolution of multiple paradigms for nursing research: a poststructuralist perspective.

Viewing a phenomenon from a point beyond its boundaries permits a clearer understanding of it. The evolution of two paradigms, or world views, for nursing research--logical positivism and phenomenology/hermeneutics--is viewed by the author from a perspective beyond either paradigm. That perspective is poststructuralism, a philosophy developed to transcend the limitations of traditional philosophy and to encourage unique thought to develop. Using the ideas of Foucault, a poststructuralist philosopher, the author discusses power/knowledge and discipline as a backdrop for nursing's significant and growing acceptance of multiple paradigms for the conduct of research.

Humans↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Assessing fit. A key indicator of family health.

Attending to how family members behave in relation to their emotional involvement with each other, as it is demonstrated in the family's structural, functional, communicational, and developmental patterns or fit, is essential to truly understanding the behavior of individual clients. Family assessment is important to certified nurse-midwives working with childbearing and childrearing women. Assessing families can help certified nurse-midwives to promote women's health and to assist with skill development for subsequent generations of women, children, and families. This paper is an overview of basic concepts of family assessment, with particular emphasis on clinical application of family theory. The focus is on assessing fit and on skills that the certified nurse-midwife can use for family assessment in daily clinical practice.

Communication↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Research to understand living with diabetes.

Acceptable descriptors for people with diabetes suggests that clinicians recognize the complexity of living with the disease. Patients are not called "diabetics," inferring that diabetes is the central aspect of their lives. Instead, they are known as "people with diabetes." This sort of description of our patients implies that they are, first and foremost, people, and that their disease is yet another aspect of their inherently complex lives. Quality-of-life issues for patients with diabetes is a vital concern of clinicians. Qualitative research, by virtue of its subjective, intimate nature, reveals to us the complexities inherent in specific questions about patients' life situations. Qualitative-research methods do not allow for prediction, identification of causal relationships, or broad generalization. However, qualitative research is an important research approach to assist clinicians in understanding the quality-of-life issues impinging on patients with diabetes. In fact, if one accepts the premise that human experience is not reducible to its parts, then qualitative research is essential to understanding the human condition and its influence on the direction and course that the illness, diabetes, will take.

Adaptation, Psychological↗