How some dyads “fail”: A qualitative analysis with implications for nursing practice
✍ Scribed by Dr. Deborah Gross
- Book ID
- 102673609
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1983
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 780 KB
- Volume
- 4
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0163-9641
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Videotapes of 20 mentally ill and 20 matched well mothers with their three month through 36-month-old-children were analyzed in a two-part study. Part I tested the usefulness of the Maternal Sensitivity Scale and the Maternal Effectiveness Scale in discriminating mentally ill and well mother-child dyads. Part I1 analyzed the interactions of those dyads that were rated low on the scales in Part I (n = 13) to explore maladaptive patterns of behavior which may explain how the insensitivity and ineffectiveness unfolded. Seven characteristics that were observed to contribute to the interactive disorganization in these 13 dyads are described and discussed.
Nurses are frequently the first health care professionals to encounter high-risk parent-child relationships. Given the variety of settings in which nurses work with families and the priority the professional reserves for the prevention of illness, it seems imperative that nurses be among the most involved in assessing, treating, and studying families at risk for psychiatric disorders.
The present study sought to analyze the relationship between maternal psychopathology and two affective variables that nurses could assess in a typical clinical situation: maternal sensitivity and maternal effectiveness. Maternal sensitivity and effectiveness were chosen for two reasons. First, as constructs they have enough flexibility to accommodate the issues that are being negotiated between the mother and child at each level of the child's development. While the behavior of the sensitive and effective mother appears different as it adapts to the changing needs of her child, the affective qualities that motivate those behaviors tend to be stable over time .'** Thus, maternal sensitivity and ef-