[The nurse answers for health in social inequalities: the development of the nursing critical paradigm.].
Until the early Eighties, critical social theory as a philosophical orientation informing nursing science, theory development and practice did not exist. Interest on this topic began to arise only after the mid-Eighties. In fact, nursing scholars questioned the validity of empiricism as the historical foundation for nursing science and the limitations of interpretivism in strengthening nursing knowledge, and thus started to focus on the lack of epistemological perspectives in nursing, giving particular prominence to the peculiar social, political, historical and economic conditions involving those who needed nursing care. The theoretical reflection began to develop, like the empirical paradigm, the post-positivist paradigm and, later, the interpretative paradigm, expanded thanks to the early works by Martha Rogers and Rosemarie Rizzo Parse, were seen as unable to address issues related to power inequities, structural constraints and oppression suffered by vulnerable groups such as the homeless, mental health individuals, people affected by HIV+ and other infectious diseases, unemployed, etc.. Empiricism and interpretative paradigms did not manage to bridge the gap between theory and praxis, and a new theoretical and philosophical approach gradually gained ground. This paradigm, based on critical social theory, was developed by distinguished scholars and intellectuals, such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School in the Thirties, and, in recent years, by Giddens, Bourdieu, Foucault, Habermas. On this social field the first works of Allen, Thompson, Stevens, Campbell and Bunting, Kendall, allowed to work out a new paradigmatic nursing approach that would have predicted the employment of the critical theory for particular nursing aspects, as a conceptual framework for nursing education, as a paradigm to carry out participatory action-research and for the development of the discipline. The purpose of this article was to describe this new paradigmatic nursing approach. In this way, we hope to give emphasis to the epistemological debate that should characterize a discipline that has undertaken by now, also in Italy, the characteristics of a scientific and a fully epistemological validity.
Rocco
Gennaro
G
Direttore corso di Laurea in Infermieristica Università di Tor Vergata _ Sede IDI _ IRCCS Roma.
Stievano
Alessandro
A
D004506:Education, Nursing; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D019359:Knowledge; D009742:Nursing Theory; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors