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Dr.
Kathleen Scharer, PI
Child psychiatric hospitalization is
a time of crisis for both the child and the parents. The
purpose of this study is to use a naturalistic design to
describe how parents manage the experience of hospitalizing
their child in a psychiatric unit. The specific aims of
the study are to: explore the parents’ experience with
hospitalizing their child and how this experience influences
the parents’ definition of the situation; describe the
management behaviors used by the parents to accommodate to the
child’s hospitalization; examine parents’ beliefs and
expectations about the hospital staff’s role and the
parents’ role while the child is hospitalized, including
parents’ need for respite; and describe the differences
between parents who had frequent contacts and parents who had
limited contacts with hospital staff during the child’s
hospitalization. The perspectives of 20-30 sets of
parents will be elicited through an interview, using a
semi-structured interview guide. Sociodemographic data
and a log of the parents’ contact with the unit will also be
completed and used to describe the sample. Analysis of
the interviews will be aided by NUDIST software and will
include the development of substantive and conceptual coding
categories the identification of themes within and across the
categories, using the constant comparative method. The
final outcome will be a substantive theory of parental
management of a child’s psychiatric hospitalization.
This information should help psychiatric nurses understand the
parents’ experience of hospitalizing their child and how the
parents manage the experience. With increased
understanding, nurses may be able to engage parents more
effectively during the hospitalization, resulting in reduced
risk for further hospitalizations.
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