title: Coming to know ourselves as community through a nursing partnership with adolescents convicted of murder.
abstract: This research applies Newman's hermeneutic-dialectic method of pattern recognition to the lives of 12 adolescent males convicted of murder who were invited to be co-investigators in the process of understanding patterns of meaningful relationships and experiences in their lives. Comparison of the 12 life patterns revealed a strikingly similar experience of interactions with the community and yielded insight into community pattern. The process of pattern recognition was found to be transformative. This article proposes a unitary-transformative process of community pattern recognition for nurses and communities interested in understanding complex community dynamics and engaging in healthy transformations.
authors.affiliation: Nursing Department, College of Saint Catherine, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.
authors.forename: Margaret Dexheimer
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Pharris
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D003159:Community-Institutional Relations; D005195:Family Relations; D006708:Homicide / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D011329:Prisoners / Q000523:psychology*; D012189:Retrospective Studies