When Facing Hopeful and Hopeless Experiences: Using Snyder's Hope Theory to Understand Parents' Caregiving Experiences for Their Medically Complex Child
health communication; hope theory; Parent–child relationships; parental caregivers; pediatric complex chronic conditions
INTRODUCTION: An emerging subpopulation within pediatric chronic illness is children living with complex chronic conditions. Managing a child's complex chronic conditions can be emotionally taxing for parents. Many parents regard hope as a "life-sustaining and essential" process for them. METHOD: We used the central concepts within Snyder's hope theory to guide our directed content analysis of parents' interviews about their hopeful and hopeless experiences. Our sample consisted of primarily Christian married mothers. RESULTS: We found themes within each concept of Snyder's hope theory that clarifies the social and communicative processes that facilitate more hopeful thinking for parents. DISCUSSION: Understanding how individuals communicate or enact hopeful thinking is an important contributor to performing hope in social settings like hospitals and nonprofit organizations (Ronald McDonald House) that support parents with medically complex children. Our findings indicate that messages should help parents identify care solutions, offer words of encouragement, and help parents create life goals that maintain a child's quality of life.
Rafferty K A; Beck G; McGuire M
Journal of Pediatric Health Care
2020
Article information provided for research and reference use only. PedPalASCNET does not hold any rights over the resource listed here. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).
<a href="http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedhc.2020.06.003" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">10.1016/j.pedhc.2020.06.003</a>
"You Are Not Alone": Advice Giving for Parents of Children Living with Complex Chronic Conditions
complex chronic conditions; Advice; health communication; parental caregivers; pediatric healthcare; social support
Parental advice giving serves as an important form of informational support for parents of children living with complex chronic conditions (CCCs). These messages can provide backchannel insights into social challenges, best practices, and may offer different forms of experiential wisdom garnered from their own parental caregiving experiences. Contributing to the naturalistic, health-context investigations of advice messages, we interviewed 35 parents who discussed their experiences with parenting their medically complex child. Part of the broader interview protocol asked parents about advice they would offer to other parents like them. We conducted a thematic analysis of parents' responses to these questions to understand advice content, form of advice giving messages, challenges experienced by parents, and suggested best practices for managing a child's CCC. We present our findings and discuss implications on educating health care professionals about how to cultivate advice networks and the need for more parent peer mentoring programs.
Rafferty KA; Beck GA
Health Communication
2019
Article information provided for research and reference use only. PedPalASCNET does not hold any rights over the resource listed here. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).
<a href="http://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2019.1636341" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">10.1080/10410236.2019.1636341</a>