ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on defining and finding evidence of empowerment in the context of a population who have been characterised in the literature as individuals who are vulnerable to the disempowering effects of the diagnosis of a lifelong condition for their young children. The patient voice is fundamental to the empowerment model, as it is to the patient-centred model of care and to the vedio interaction guidance (VIG) intervention. The design of the intervention is appropriately suited to a patient-centred model of care in that it focuses on the unique family dynamic. It attemptes to substitute much of the subjective analytical approach with systematic methods, governed by a clear protocol. The corpus analysis software promptly produced a synoptic of the conversational data, reducing an hour-long session to a few key extracts constituting its most representative data. The cluster tagging process identified what was of statistical significance in the data as determined by the semantic content of what was spoken.