Thesis

'An inkling of hope' : understanding personal recovery in individuals transitioning out of chronic homelessness : a transatlantic qualitative study

Creator
Rights statement
Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2020
Thesis identifier
  • T15670
Person Identifier (Local)
  • 201652405
Qualification Level
Qualification Name
Department, School or Faculty
Abstract
  • Individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) who are homeless are a client group with complex but often misunderstood and unmet health and social care needs. Although adopted by mental health policies and programmes in many developed countries, personal (mental health) recovery has remained markedly underresearched and undertheorised in relation to socio-structural disadvantage such as homelessness. This transatlantic qualitative participatory study aimed to address those knowledge and explanatory deficits by exploring how individuals with a history of SMI and chronic homelessness made sense of their personal recovery, as well as what the barriers to, and facilitators of, their recovery were. This study also endeavoured to unravel the socio-structural and contextual influences shaping recovery, as well as how individuals navigated and negotiated those to enable better well-being and recovery. The life stories and present-day narratives of 18 clients of temporary accommodation services in the U.S. and Scotland were elicited using in-depth interviews and a mobile phone diary between February and September 2018. Data from 45 interviews and more than 200 diary entries were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and abductive-retroductive, critical realist analysis. The IPA revealed the significance of ‘owning’ one’s recovery, as well as that of safety and constancy, insight, coping and symptom management, nurturing a strong and positive sense of self, meaning in life, and feeling ‘wanted, accepted and needed’. Those super-ordinate themes captured the processes of envisioning and enacting recovery amidst homelessness. The critical realist analysis produced an explanatory model of personal recovery, whereby recovery was the emergent outcome of the interplay between the conditioning effects of certain social structures and cultures and participants’ own agential capacities manifested in autonomous or fractured reflexive deliberations. Mental health and homelessness services should be designed and delivered in ways that enable clients’ intrinsic capacities for self-reflection, self-directedness and emotional connectedness.
Advisor / supervisor
  • Weaver, Beth
  • Quinn, Neil
Resource Type
Note
  • Previously held under moratorium from 28th August 2020 until 28th August 2023.
DOI
Date Created
  • 2020
Former identifier
  • 9912910491302996
Funder

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