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 concepts they attempt to define.) Adaptation to an environment does not correspond to our naive notions of good patient treatment, in situations such as a prisoner in a maximum security detention facility, whose growth into a violent top dog who makes the other prisoners his bitches a good Adaptation Theory nurse would be obliged to assist.
It's a common naive view of evolution that it consistently makes organisms better and more advanced according to human notions of advancement (and perhaps this misconception is at the root of Adaptation Theory, if it takes adaptation to one's environment as its mandate.) But according to ordinary human values, environments can impose perverse pressures , so that the results of adapting to them can be quite horrible. If the most face-value interpretation of Adaptation Theory tells you that it's better for a patient growing up in a violent slum to become a high-powered drug dealer who occasionally has people shot and has women all over the slum raising children who don't know their father than for him to get some sort of job or education which gets him out of there, it's probably not a very good theory.
If we can't take Adaptation Theory at face value, but instead have to twist it around so as to interpret it as telling us to do what already seems like common sense, then it's definitely not a very good theory.
I am so tempted to print your comment out and show it to my teacher...
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?