Advocacy has been an increasingly important concept in the field of social and health care over the last two decades. The 1986 Disabled Person's Act and the NHS and Community Care Act (1990) have both made reference to the roles available for independent representatives of individuals and advocacy organisations have been developed throughout the UK. Despite this there has been remarkably little investigation into the topic. The majority of the research in this area has focused on self-advocacy and legal or professional advocacy. Citizen advocacy, the development of a one to one relationship between an unpaid private individual and someone at risk of isolation or exclusion, has not been a popular area for systematic investigation. Research in this area has tended to focus on evaluating the services provided by citizen advocacy organisations to allocate funding or is literature of a descriptive nature to promote citizen advocacy as a positive concept in a person' s life to carers and service providers. Of the studies of a more critical nature, only three have involved the partner's views in their evaluation. The aim of the present study is to focus on the the views and perceptions of users of advocacy services, and to explore their views through qualitative methods of analysis. Six partners and their advocates where interviewed about their advocacy partnership and the transcripts analysed using an inductive grounded theory approach (Henwood and Pidgeon (1995)) to generate themes emerging from the data. Further analysis of three partner's transcripts and two advocate transcripts using "thematic decomposition" techniques (Stenner 1993) was done to identify subject positions and dominant discourses used to describe the citizen advocacy partnership. Four main themes emerged: qualities of the advocate, concept of advocacy, relationships to others (in comparison to advocate) and the development of the advocacy relationship. Each of the three transcripts analysed using thematic decomposition showed a variety of subject positions relating to the roles that the advocate and partner took in a dynamic relationship. The results are discussed in the context of previous research and clinical relevance. Suggestions for future research in this area are also considered.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:532399 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Sheppard, Nancy Clare |
| Publisher | University of East London |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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