Elizabeth Banister

YOUNG WOMEN'S HEALTH CONCERNS: REVEALING PARADOX

Because of the numerous physical, psychological, and social changes that take place for adolescents, the risk of engaging in life-threatening behavior is greater than at any other time in their life-span. Community workers identified the invisibility of adolescent women (ages 16–24) in their health-related programs and sought to rectify this. To discover the unmet health concerns of adolescent women, eight focus groups were held with a diverse group of adolescent women. Forty-two adolescent women, including adolescent mothers, women of color, attendees at a drop-in youth center, high school and university students, and employed persons participated. While most women attended one focus group, some participants attended two. Using Spradleys ethnographic method, we identified two overarching themes shared by the adolescent women. These themes included feeling invisible and struggling with independence. Our findings underscore the invisibility of adolescent womens lived experiences and concerns within most research agendas.

BEYOND TALKING GROUPS: STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING ADOLESCENT HEALTH EDUCATION

In a study that focused on adolescent girls’ health issues within their dating relationships, we found that nonstructured focus group conversation can be augmented with structured strategies to generate a nonthreatening environment in which participants are enabled to co-create an understanding of their experiences. The use of free writing, role playing, and body tracing helped raise participants’ awareness and understanding of some of their health behaviors. We suggest that these strategies can be used in health care and educational contexts to promote the health of adolescents. By sharing strategies between education and health care professionals, both professions will benefit.

Data collection strategies for accessing adolescent women's worlds.

A two-year study was initiated in 1999 to investigate adolescent womens health concerns pertaining to their relationships. Data were obtained from four groups of girls (ages 14-19; N = 31) that met for approximately 18 weeks each. To help equalize power in the groups and facilitate a respectful and caring environment, we encouraged each group to use a variety of strategies, including those based on feminist principles. Data collection procedures based on feminist values can enable researchers to gain rich descriptions on the lived experience of adolescent women. Such procedures can help create an environment in which individuals can articulate their concerns and collectively co-construct the meanings of life events in health-promoting and consciousness-raising ways.

I was pretty sure I had the 'flu: qualitative description of confirmed-influenza symptoms.

Influenza is a common infectious disease, yet its diagnosis is rarely confirmed, rather is presumed in the presence of non-specific clinical symptoms. Public health organisations enlist the lay person in the diagnostic process, as infection containment initiatives focus on encouraging individuals with influenza-like illness to stay at home, seeking medical attention only in the presence of complications. While lay self-diagnosis of influenza has been confirmed to be neither specific nor sensitive, little is known about how people with confirmed-influenza infection describe their illness. In this article we report the descriptions of influenza by 21 individuals with rapid antigen test-kit confirmation of influenza A or B and we discuss their recommendations for management of future influenza infection. Semi-structured interviews reveal that the variability in symptoms and severity of disease makes a standard description of influenza elusive. Almost all participants had a cough, sweats, runny nose and muscle aches, but the prominence of these symptoms varied significantly between participants. Most participants were preoccupied with diagnostic certainty, and would seek medical attention in a future similar illness episode. This study underlined a conditioned recourse to medical authority for confirmation of diagnosis which challenges current public health strategies and should be further explored in order to determine its wider impact.

Learning about Aboriginal contexts: the reading circle approach.

As more opportunities arise for nursing students to obtain experience in community sites, they will be called on to practice in culturally appropriate ways more often. Although nurses remain challenged by the range of populations needing differentiated approaches, Aboriginal cultural contexts deserve special attention. Nurse educators must help students increase their understanding of Aboriginal life and ways of knowing. One way to facilitate this understanding is through a learning approach called reading circles. Reading circles offer a structure in the classroom for students to interact about ideas or readings. The reading circle process is congruent with Aboriginal ways of learning, which emphasize working in circle, with each member having a role and an equal chance to be heard. Aboriginal students in the class may be particularly comfortable with this learning method. This article describes specific steps for incorporating the reading circle approach into the nurse education classroom.

Women's Lived Experience of Conceptualizing the Self: Implications for Health Care Practice

In this article we describe a unique qualitative research design in which we used our own lived experiences as the basis for understanding theories of the self. Our purpose in this study was to (a) broaden current understandings of self theory, (b) juxtapose theories of the self with lived experiences of selfhood, and (c) use these new understandings to inform health care practice. The participants were four Canadian middle-aged female academic and health care practitioners. We conducted unstructured, open-ended interviews. Through a collaborative, interpretive process, four recurring themes emerged from the womens narratives: struggling for authenticity, inner knowing, changing over time, and the contextual self. We address the need for practitioners to understand theories of the self--their own and their clients--and how these theories impact their clinical practice.

Teaching Feminist Group Process Within a Nursing Curriculum

Nurse educators are challenged to develop emancipatory teaching approaches that will create opportunities for students to develop their own praxis. In particular, the authors faced the challenge of teaching feminist group process within a curriculum based on phenomenology, feminism, and critical social theory. In this article, we discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching nursing and other students about feminist process through the creation of experiential learning opportunities. In addition, we highlight recommendations based on our own praxis.

Using Curriculum Design Principles to Improve Health Education for Adolescent Girls

Learning and teaching are main concepts within health contexts, but curriculum theory is generally overlooked in the design of health education. In this paper, we describe the curriculum development component of a health research study designed to develop and present educational interventions for adolescent girls. Through the use of these interventions, we encouraged the girls to recognize and address potential health compromises in their dating relationships. By blending our disciplinary approaches of nursing and education to address the challenges of this research, we developed a curriculum that would effectively meet the needs of the participants. To do this, we assessed humanistic, social reconstructionist, technological, and academic curriculum approaches to determine that our approach is one of social reconstruction. We then considered teacher-centered, learner-centered, and problem-centered curriculum designs, choosing both learner and problem centered, and analyzed six dimensions of these designs. We describe these approaches, designs, and dimensions of curriculum considering pedagogical issues, criteria for evaluation, and appropriateness to educational health intervention programs.

Online, Tuned In, Turned On: Multimedia Approaches to Fostering Critical Media Health Literacy for Adolescents.

The commercial media is an influential sociocultural force and transmitter of health information especially for adolescents. Instruction in critical media health literacy, a combination of concepts from critical health literacy and critical media literacy, is a potentially effective means of raising adolescents’ awareness about commercial media and its influence on their health. We first provide background on critical media health literacy for adolescents. We then discuss the potential for involving adolescents in creating multimedia to demonstrate basic principles of critical media health literacy skills. Using excerpts from two of our research projects to illustrate our ideas, we draw conclusions and suggest future research in critical media health literacy for adolescents.

Responding to Adolescent Women's Reproductive Health Concerns: Empowering Clients Through Health Literacy

Adolescents have particular needs in health care that are often not met. Health care providers can help overcome barriers that hinder adolescents’ effective use of health services by incorporating health literacy strategies that are developmentally and contextually appropriate, and that actively involve adolescents in their own learning. Based on extensive practice and research experience in Canada with rural and urban high school adolescent women, we offer suggestions for how health care providers can respond to adolescent womens reproductive health concerns by teaching these young women how to increase their skills in functional, communicative/interactive, and critical health literacy.