Understanding Empathic Engagement of a Fourth-Year Nursing Student Through Narrative Inquiry
Date
2019-05-02
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
There has been substantial research on empathy and the components of empathy for nursing education and nursing practice (Alligood, 1992; 2007; Evans et al., 1998; Gagan, 1983; Kalisch, 1973; Kunyk & Olson, 2001; Morse et al., 1992; Ward, 2016; Ward et al., 2012) but very little research has addressed how students come to understand empathic engagement, a social phenomenon of human connection. Empathic engagement is a liminal relational experience, based on the principles of empathy and humanistic values that leads to a spatiotemporal phenomenon of human interconnectedness. Empathic engagement moves beyond feeling empathy for a person, beyond empathic concern and elements of cognitive empathy. In this study, I explored explore how fourth-year nursing students come to understand and recognize empathic engagement in their work and how students make meaning from this unique phenomenon in nursing practice. This study used narrative inquiry by way of written and visual narratives, followed by a face-to-face semi-structured conversation between the participant and the researcher about the participant’s experience. “Humans are story-telling organisms who, individually and socially, lead storied lives” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 2). The use of narratives enabled participants to express his or her constructed and objective reality and to articulate “the temporality and liminality of human beings’ interpretation of their lives” (Sandelowski, 1991, p. 161). Fulford (1999) notes, “stories are how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves, and how we often do all three at once” (p. 9). The outcomes of this study introduced four phases of empathic engagement and will add new knowledge to nursing curricula addressing humanistic values of nursing practice.
Description
Keywords
empathy, empathic engagement, nursing students, nursing education, humanity, narrative inquiry
Citation
Sealock, K. (2019). Understanding Empathic Engagement of a Fourth-Year Nursing Student Through Narrative Inquiry (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.