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 interpretive 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 ethnography, ethnomethodology, the naturalistic methods used by Mattingly and Schon to study practice, and especially narrative analysis as described 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 transcription, coding, and analysis of transcripts from approximately 20 hours of interview time. First, this narrative analysis provides an example of bow the occupational science framework can evoke a particular kind of storytelling in which childhood occupation can be related to adult character Storytelling of this kind is later shown to be therapeutic for the stroke survivor Next, the narrative illustrates bow rehabilitation 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 picture is given of bow occupational story making and occupational storytelling embedded in real life can nurture the human spirit to act and can become the core of clinical practice.