YorkSpace

YorkSpace is York University's Institutional Repository. It supports York University's Senate Policy on Open Access by providing York community members with a place to preserve their research online in an institutional context.

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    Women leaving heterosexuality a mid-life : transformations in self and relations
    (2001-12) Armstrong, M. Sharon; Toukmanian, Shake
    The purpose of this study was to investigate women's experience of leaving heterosexuality at mid-life. Nine lesbian (or gay) identified women, ranging in age from 41 to 55, who had been previously married and who had previously identified as heterosexual participated in the study. During interviews of approximately 2 hours in length, participants were asked to describe their experience of transformation from a heterosexual to a non-heterosexual identity and the impact that this change had on their daily life and relationships. The interviews were transcribed by the researcher and a grounded analysis was conducted utilising QSR NVivo 1.2.142, a software programme designed to facilitate qualitative analyses. The grounded analysis was carried out according to the procedures and principles of grounded theory and methodical hermeneutics. Taking a participant-researcher perspective, the researcher added data from her own experience as a mid-life lesbian to later phases of the analysis. The resulting theoretical representation is a hierarchical category structure consisting of four levels. Twenty-nine first-order categories, which were grounded in the transcript data, were grouped together to form the following second-order categories: "Socialization," "Marriage," "Lesbian Awakenings," "Self-transformations," "Coming Out," "Breaking New Ground," "Leaving the Marriage," and "Shifting Motherhood." These higher order categories were subsequently grouped into three meaningful third-order categories: "Heterosexual Life," "Leaving Heterosexuality--The Experience of Transformation," and "Leaving Heterosexuality--Relational Transformations." The categories "Heterosexual Life" and "Leaving Heterosexuality" reflect the before-and-after quality of the overall experience of leaving heterosexuality at mid-life, while the two aspects of leaving heterosexuality, "The Experience of Transformation" and "Relational Transformations," reflect changes in self and identity versus changes in roles and relations. The core category that evolved as the overall organising representation of the data was one of transformation, which I labelled "Women Leaving Heterosexuality at Mid-life: Transformations in Self and Relations". The findings of this analysis are discussed in terms of the following: the social construction of identity; the experience of transformation at mid-life, including the labels we use for sexual orientation and women's capacity for intimacy and intimacy needs; coming out as a mature woman, including the loss of heterosexual privilege and coming out to family members; and the redefinition of family.
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    Self-Concept, Schematic Processing and Change in Perceptual-Processing Experiential Therapy
    (1994-12) Armstrong, M. Sharon; Toukmanian, Shake
    The purpose of the present research was to determine the degree of relationship between pre-treatment to post-treatment changes in clients' self-schemata and level of self-concept, and to explore, both quantitatively and descriptively, the processes involved in the development of self-schemata in the context of the perceptual-processing method of experiential therapy (Toukmanian, 1990). The study was constructed in two parts. Part I focused on the examination of change in self-concept and self-schemata, from the standpoint of clients' in-therapy process and final outcome. As was hypothesized, participants who received perceptual-processing experiential therapy improved on measures of self-concept and self-schemata to a significantly greater degree than participants who received skills training. Correspondingly, clients with the greatest in-therapy gains in perceptual-processing tended to have greater pre-treatment to post-treatment gains on the measures of self-concept and perceptual congruence. These results provided tentative support for the conception of change specified by the perceptual-processing therapeutic approach (Toukmanian, 1992) that self-schemata become more elaborate and flexible as a result of therapy, and that clients who engage in more complex processing operations are more likely to show improvement in self-concept and increased flexibility of self-schemata. In Part II, a descriptive analysis was conducted on one client's experience of a segment of therapy that was identified by her as therapeutically significant, in light of Toukmanian's (1992) model of therapy. The results of this analysis provided support for the proposed model. First, the event that the client described as most meaningful to her was found to be the same segment of therapy that had been described as high processing in terms of Toukmanian's model of perceptual-processing (1992). Secondly, the client was able to identify elements of her in-therapy experience that were conceptually relevant to the taxonomy proposed by the model.
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    Characterizing therapy focus and exploring client process : investigating therapeutic modalities from a narrative approach
    (1996-08) Hardtke, Karen Kristin; Angus, Lynne
    The aim of this exploratory study was a systematic investigation of three inter-related areas, a discovery-oriented macro to micro analysis of therapy discourse. The first study goal involved the application of the Narrative Processes Coding System (NPCS; Angus, Hardtke and Levitt, 1992) as a heuristic to explore, rather than to verify, possible differences in the reconstruction and co-construction of the self macro narrative both within therapy dyads exposed to the same treatment modality, as well as across therapeutic approach. Developed within the conceptual framework of the Narrative Processes Theory of Therapy (Angus & Hardtke, 1994), the NPCS is a comprehensive categorization system which first characterizes therapy transcripts according to shifts in topic content and then according to narrative process type. The NPCS also identifies the role of client and therapist in shifting therapy content and narrative process. The NPCS was applied to each therapy session of six good-outcome dyads recently involved in a National Institute Mental Health (NIMH) Study of Depression. Three dyads participated in short-term client-centred therapy while three were exposed to shrot-term process-experiential therapy. The second aim was the identification of the predominant relationship theme in one dyad from each therapy modality represented in this study. Emerging from this second objective, the third and final aim was to explicate this interpersonal theme from the therapy transcripts in order to conduct a comparative analysis of the clients' experience of self, and self in relation to other, by the application of the Client Experiencing Scale (Klein, Mathieu, Gendlin & Kiesler, 1970). Both descriptive and statistical analyses were used. Results from the macro analyses suggested differences in both frequency and pattern of narrative process across therapeutic approach. Differences regarding the role of client and therapist in shifting content and process were also found across approach. Results from applying the Client Experiencing Scale (Klein et. al., 1970) to the explicated interpersonal theme in the two dyads selected for the micro analyses of this study suggested that the process-experiential therapy dyad achieved a higher general level of experiencing of self in relation to order.
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    Del territorio sumergido a la apatridia: lagunas normativas y soluciones jurídicas
    (Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas, Universidad de Jaén, 2025-10-28) Caller Tramullas, Lorena
    El cambio climático impacta directamente en elementos constitutivos del Estado, como el territorio y la población, planteando un desafío relevante para el Derecho Internacional. El aumento del nivel del mar y fenómenos conexos amenazan la existencia de los Estados insulares, provocan desplazamientos forzados y generan un riesgo de apatridia. Este vacío normativo se debe a que ni la Convención de 1951 sobre los Refugiados ni los instrumentos internacionales sobre apatridia ofrecen protección adecuada a quienes deben abandonar su país por motivos ambientales. Ante ello, el Derecho Internacional explora soluciones innovadoras que aseguren la continuidad de los Estados y los derechos de sus habitantes. En este contexto, el principio "uti possidetis iuris," tradicionalmente aplicado en procesos de descolonización, podría adaptarse al ámbito marítimo para preservar la estatalidad. Su interacción con el principio de prevención de la apatridia permitiría afrontar una crisis humanitaria de alcance global priorizando los Derechos Humanos y la justicia climática.
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    The story-teller, the story and change : a narrative exploration of outcome in brief experiential treatments for depression
    (2007-03) Hardtke, Karen Kristin; Angus, Lynne
    Although conceptualizing clinical phenomena in terms of "narrative" has come under the purview of investigators in the psychotherapy research field, few have developed research agendas that include assessing treatment outcome from a narrative approach. Fuelled by the notion that the stories people tell about themselves are essential threads in the fabric of their self-identities, this study presents the first comprehensive investigation of participant post-treatment and follow-up change applying the Narrative Assessment Interview (NAI; Hardtke & Angus, 1998) and it illustrates the rich and meaningful material gleaned from a triangulated methodology. The NAI was developed for this study to provide a heuristic method to investigate the impact of psychotherapy treatment over time on clients' self-perception and on the aspects of self they wished to change in treatment, as illustrated by their stories. The NAI was administered at baseline, post-treatment and again 6-months following treatment to a sample of 20 participants who took part in a brief-experiential treatment program for depression. Comparative post-treatment analyses of participants' baseline NAI profiles indicated that the recovered group differed from the non-recovered group along the dimensions of self-perception, treatment goals in terms of desires for self-change, and degree of convergence between how they viewed themselves and how they perceived they were viewed by others. Analyses of participants' post-treatment and follow-up self-stories indicated differing patterns of autobiographical memory subtypes. Results also strongly suggested that those participants who recovered from their depression were able to solidify gains made in treatment in their stories of change, thereby suggesting that the ability to generate alternative stories may indeed be an important marker of client change and treatment efficacy. Qualitative analyses of the NAIs of two participants with contrasting outcomes highlighted the value of using a pluralistic approach in the investigation of the clients' experience of change, as well as illustrating the potential utility of the NAI as a tool for both researchers and clinicians.