<p> Perinatal loss is a relatively common occurrence and is defined as any loss, from conception through the first 28 days of life, including miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death. In this dissertation, perinatal will refer to the death of an infant due to miscarriage or stillbirth. Researchers says that understanding how mothers perceive the care after perinatal loss can play a significant role in their care, treatment, and health. The purpose of this appreciative inquiry action research study was to examine what women need to feel supported, emotionally, physically and spiritually within a hospital setting and how these supports impact women experiencing perinatal loss. Through participation interviews from women who experienced the loss and questionnaires answered by nurses and social workers, an investigation of what women perceive to be beneficial in receiving care after perinatal loss. Interviews were used to collect information from a sample of nine women who experienced prenatal loss in a hospital setting, as well as five nurses or social workers who provided support to these individuals were asked to participate in an interview, but if unable to then a questionnaire will be email to them. The information collected in this study was useful to medical and mental health professionals to develop more effective interventions to assist staff to support the women experiencing the loss, while validating the loss and treating the women with respect.</p>

A small percentage of mentally ill patients, sometimes referred to as 'revolving door' patients, are frequently readmitted to psychiatric hospitals. This study explores how these patients construct meaning and reality and how this enacted reality provides a context for shaping their identities. The study draws on mental health policy, political ideologies and the history of deinstitutionalisation in order to illuminate this problematic phenomenon. The study is framed within the social sciences, but more specifically within the fields of mental health and social work practice. The methodology is qualitative, placing emphasis on a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The foundation of the study is underpinned by a social construction and social psychology framework. A unique minimalist interview technique based on the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method is used for data collection and analysis. Data from seven interviews with participants are presented followed by the researcher's reflections on the interviews and post-interview process. The life stories of four of the seven participants are analysed by using reflective teams. The lived life, or chronological chain of events as narrated, is analysed sequentially and separately. The told story, or thematic ordering of the narration, is then analysed using thematic field analysis; this involved reconstructing the participants' system of knowledge, their interpretations of their lives and their classification of experiences into thematic fields. An integrated procedure of abductive and inductive analysis of the stories elicited from participants offered immense potential for constructing meaning. Perspectives on 'revolving door' patients have often regarded them as having a one-dimensional life. This study revealed that these existential lives are complex and diverse and exist within a cultural matrix of social and psychological constructs. Interpretations of these patients' experiences illuminate the complexities arising from multiple admissions to psychiatric hospitals and highlight the problematic aspects which impact their socially constructed identities. These case studies of 'revolving door' patients' personally narrated lives extend the social psychological study of self/identity and contribute to the field of mental health research.

A case study in the politics of social provision, this dissertation uncovers the origins of a legal dispute between directors of a charitable trust and its female beneficiaries during the Progressive Era. In 1919 the poor women of Brattleboro, Vermont, legatees of the Thomas Thompson Trust, sued the Boston-based charity for mismanagement and demanded increased benefits and a role in monitoring trust allocations. An examination of charity case records, legal testimony, and local resources reveals the roots of their collective action in the experience of getting help. At a time when reformers were reconstructing charity to accommodate the shift from a moral to scientific approach to poverty, the case reveals the gender and class relations that shaped social policy. Highlighting the perspective of charity clients, the study shows how both providers and the needy constructed charity policy. Over the course of two decades, interaction among charity administrators, middle-class women, visiting nurses and poor, mostly native-born white women resulted in a medical definition of female poverty. Increased access to medical care and health education led beneficiaries to fashion a definition of female worthiness that combined recognition of their wage-earning with protection and support for ill health and old age. The shift from a moral to physical explanation of female poverty strengthened poor women's claims to direct relief while it encouraged charity administrators to develop health programs and to cultivate public support. Despite an alliance with civic leaders seeking local control over charitable funds, poor women failed to attain legal recognition of their claims, but they nonetheless modified trust policy. The redefinition of female poverty as a medical problem bolstered women's sense of entitlement and expanded health services for the poor and working-class community. Improved access to health experts, however, did little to resolve poor women's economic difficulties and helped undermine their sense of self-sufficiency as they adapted to middle-class assumptions about female weakness and invalidity.