OCCUPATION EMBEDDED IN A REAL-LIFE - INTERWEAVING OCCUPATIONAL SCIENCE AND OCCUPATIONAL-THERAPY - 1993 SLAGLE,ELEANOR,CLARKE LECTURE

This lecture presents an example of research in the genre of interpret ive occupational science and demonstrates bow occupational science can inform clinical practice. The innovative qualitative methodology used blended elements of the anthropological tradition of life history eth nography, ethnomethodology, the naturalistic methods used by Mattingly and Schon to study practice, and especially narrative analysis as des cribed by Polkinghorne The bulk of the paper is presented in the form of a narrative analysis that provides an account of a stroke survivor' s personal struggle for recovery, a story that emerged from transcript ion, coding, and analysis of transcripts from approximately 20 hours o f interview time. First, this narrative analysis provides an example o f bow the occupational science framework can evoke a particular kind o f storytelling in which childhood occupation can be related to adult c haracter Storytelling of this kind is later shown to be therapeutic fo r the stroke survivor Next, the narrative illustrates bow rehabilitati on can be experienced by the survivor as a rite of Passage in which a person is moved to disability status and then abandoned. Finally, a pi cture is given of bow occupational story making and occupational story telling embedded in real life can nurture the human spirit to act and can become the core of clinical practice.