CASE STUDY AND THE APPLICATION OF CONCEPTS

Case Study and the Application of Relevant Concepts

Case Study and the Application of Relevant Concepts

Jennifer and the Concept of Health

Speaking in the context of the case study provided it might be said that health is connected with the idea of wholeness. This is evident in the verb heal, with the sense of regaining wholeness. The healthy person is a person who is whole in the sense of having all the properties that should pertain to a human being. Health has thus traditionally been viewed as an ideal notion, a notion of perfection that very few people, if any, can completely attain. Today, health also sometimes functions as an ideal notion. This is, indeed, the case with the formulation of health by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its initial declaration, published in 1948: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not only the absence of disease or injury” (Boorse, 1977).

Reading the case study it appears that the notion of health is the object of scientific study from several points of view and within several disciplines. Besides research by those in medicine, public health, nursing, and other paramedical disciplines, other investigations are based in anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. In some of these disciplines, the focus is on a particular aspect of the notion: for example, in psychology, the experience of health and illness and in anthropology and sociology, health and illness as factors of social importance. Philosophical analyses of health have often involved an attempt to formulate global definitions of the idea. Thus, in the following, many references will be taken from philosophical theories of health (Boorse, 1977).

Jennifer and the Concept Well-Being

Reading the case it clearly appears that Well-being is a state of optimal experience and functioning. Traditionally, well-being has been viewed from two different perspectives: hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being. The hedonic perspective views well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance. Hedonic well-being is most commonly assessed by measurements of subjective well-being (SWB): one's cognitive and affective evaluation of one's life. There are four components of SWB: life satisfaction (global judgments of one's life), satisfaction with important domains (e.g., work satisfaction), positive affect (experiencing many pleasant emotions and moods), and low levels of negative affect (experiencing few unpleasant emotions and moods) (Lee and Sirgy, 2004).

The eudaimonic perspective goes beyond the assessment of simple pleasure and pain and views well-being as the extent to which a person is fully functioning, living a life of meaning and self-realization. From the eudaimonic perspective, feeling a complete range of emotional experiences is seen as a positive characteristic of a fully functioning individual. Further, well-being is defined by the degree to which a person embodies such traits as autonomy, personal growth, self-acceptance, life purpose, mastery, and positive relatedness. Whereas hedonic well-being does not necessarily influence eudaimonic well-being in that many pleasurable activities do not produce wellness, the reverse is usually true; engaging in eudaimonic activities increases SWB in terms of ...