I seem unable to come up with specific criticisms of what this nursing theory is missing
Can you go over the exercises suggested in comments on the "Be specific" post, and see if any of them sounds likely to help, or even merely dislodges new ideas for you?
For instance, along the lines of "Filing a bug report", could you try writing a letter to the Department of Theories Department at Knol-Mart, starting with the line "Dear Sirs, I am hereby returning to you my shipment of Roy's Adaptation Theory (nearly unused) which I found defective in the following ways. First, when I tried turning the Health knob on this Theory..."
For a more specific exercise, try locating the opposites of the definitions given. For instance, given a definition for "health", you should be able to invert the terms to get a definition for "illness".
For another, try comparing the theory with some other model - for instance the "naive" model of whatever-it-is that you would have used if you hadn't ever been exposed to the Roy thing, your "intuition" of these things - does the latter give you some specific conclusions, predictions and angles of attack? If so it's doing at least one thing better. Find out why.
For a third, try listing some things that you absolutely wouldn't expect a sane Theory to lead you to do (say, tell the poor guy to "stop whining and get a job"), and based on the general idea that theories should add up to normality, ask how Roy's Adaptation Theory specifically prohibits you from doing them. (If it doesn't, that's where it's broken.)
For a third, try listing some things that you absolutely wouldn't expect a sane Theory to lead you to do (say, tell the poor guy to "stop whining and get a job"), and based on the general idea that theories should add up to normality, ask how Roy's Adaptation Theory specifically prohibits you from doing them. (If it doesn't, that's where it's broken.)
This is the second thing that jumped out at me when reading the components of Roy's Adaptation Theory (the first being that the "definitions" completely fail to circumscribe the actual c...
I'm currently writing an essay for one of my classes, 'Theoretical Foundations of Nursing.' I'm about the most 'gong-si' class I've ever taken. (That is a Chinese term for 'shit talking,' which is my boyfriend's favourite term for any field that gets into arguments over definitions, has concepts that don't correspond to any empirical phenomena, is based on ideology, etc.)
The essay involves analyzing a clinical situation (in this case a 55-year-old recently divorced, recently unemployed man, admitted to the psychiatric ward with major depression and suicidal ideation) using a theory (in this case, Roy's Adaptation Model). Done. The next step involves finding criticisms with the model...and despite the fact that I've been complaining about this class and its non-empirical nature all semester, I seem unable to come up with specific criticisms of what this nursing theory is missing.
Which is what I need your help for, because LessWrong is the best community ever when it comes to specific criticisms.
Here is a very brief overview of Roy's Adaptation Theory:
Now my question is, what is a specific criticism I can make of this particular theory in general...not "your definitions aren't specific enough" or "the whole field of nursing theory isn't reductionist enough", but something that this kind of theory should have but doesn't. Any ideas?