ABSTRACT

In order to broaden and deepen the 'experience' stage of the process beyond her personal experiences, the author conducted semi-structured interviews with twelve women within eighteen months of giving birth to their first, second, or third child. Miller-McLemore makes use of the web concept to argue that pastoral care should not see people only as individuals, but rather treat them within their complex web of relationships. Couture discusses the limitations of individual approaches to pastoral care and argues that it should rather be enacted within a web model, which takes seriously the socio-political realities of individual lives, as opposed to a narrow focus on psychological resources. In describing her web weaving methodology, the author uses vocabulary from Cartledge's dialectic model. The author focuses on one organizing theme within one of the three global themes, which equates to one revolution around the web. She found that this web-weaving methodological approach worked particularly well within her thesis.