Narrative ethics for narrative care
Section snippets
Narrative care
The concept of narrative care is only just starting to coalesce as a field of study and practice. While some narrative practices have been around for a while (e.g., narrative therapy, developed by White and Epston in the early 1990s), others are more recently formulated (see Bohlmeijer, Kenyon, & Randall, 2011), and while there is a sense that these approaches have something in common, it is probably too early to conduct a systematic concept analysis of the term “narrative care.” Having said
The narrative terrain of ethics
With the growth of interest in narrative, it is not surprising to find a developing literature on the subject of narrative and ethics. Broadly speaking, narrative is viewed as relevant to ethics in a number of ways. First, it is argued that stories can act as a means of moral education (see Murray, 1997) either through the lesson they teach or, as Gregory (2009) expounds, through engendering empathy and ethical sensitivity, as ethical issues can be experienced (albeit somewhat vicariously)
Common ethical theories and their limitations for guiding narrative care
Three normative ethical theories frequently guide decision making in health and social care: consequentialism, deontology, and principlism. I want to suggest that none of these align well with the concept of narrative care. Rather than embracing the richness, uniqueness, situatedness, and history of each ethical encounter between two or more people, they limit their focus to one narrow facet of ethical choice. All three can roughly be called prescriptive or normative ethical frameworks, meaning
Some contours of narrative ethics
If the above has gained any purchase as giving grounds to think that a narrative approach to ethics might have something more to offer to narrative care than other, more well-established frameworks, it is incumbent upon me to at least outline what such an ethics might involve. This outline cannot but be a general survey of the terrain, a mapping of contours, for to attempt to construct a detailed code with neatly outlined specifics would be to court the danger of establishing a totalizing
Concluding remarks
Narrative care is concerned with how people structure their stories and thus bring meaning and significance to their lives. It is also concerned with how people construct their identities in the face of life's vicissitudes, and how they characterize, and thus shape, their relationships with others and the world. Narrative care is thus personal, experiential, concrete, and communicative. On this basis, I have argued for an ethics that is also personal, experiential, concrete, and
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2022, Journal of Aging StudiesCitation Excerpt :The care practitioners stated that engaging in the life story of residents had a positive effect in the care relationship and contributed to the ‘quality of connection’ between the care practitioner and the resident (Randall, 2016; Villar & Serrat, 2017). The integration of PCC in everyday care practice in the participating nursing homes can be attributed largely to the shift in emphasis made by the care practitioners: from a problem-solving and operational care approach towards a relational and narrative care approach (Baart & Willemse, 2010; Baldwin, 2015; Pols, 2013). Nevertheless, to establish personhood preserving practices more permanently will require an ongoing process, and attuning to the life story of residents with dementia will remain a matter of trial and error.
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2020, Journal of Aging StudiesCitation Excerpt :As Lloyd (2006) explained, care “entails perceiving, interpreting, and acting on needs, bearing in mind that social and organizational contexts shape and influence perceptions, interpretations, and actions” (p. 1178). Scholars argue that an examination of what one could or should do in a cultural context requires reflexivity and sensemaking, with a focus on narrative, in particular, for doing so (Baldwin, 2015; Black, 2018; Harter, 2017; Kleinman, 2013). For example, Baldwin (2015) noted that exploring the stories of individuals and the wider narratives impacting them makes it possible to determine the plot trajectory that emerges from and continues the story in an ethical fashion.
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