Empowerment research has generally been limited to the individual level of analysis. Efforts to study empowerment beyond the individual require conceptual frameworks suggesting attributes that define the construct and guide its measurement. This paper presents an initial attempt to describe the nomological network of empowerment at the organizational level of analysis--organizational empowermen...

BACKGROUND Providers and healthcare organizations have begun recognizing the importance of patient empowerment as a driver of patient-centered care. Unfortunately, most studies have investigated empowerment with single diseases. Identifying factors of empowerment across conditions and populations would enable a greater understanding of this construct. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was t...

Despite the rich literature on networks, publications on the evaluation of networks are scarce. The aim of the article is to present the core concepts of network evaluation in the context of local and regional development, and a case study in Finnish North-Karelia. It is argued that network evaluation from the everyday life perspective (NEELP) is a special case. It requires an integrative desig...

This article employs and extends the concept of technical code (Feenberg, 1992, 1995a, 1995b) to examine the current state of the internet. The notion of technical code – the cultural and social assumptions and values that become manifest in a technology’s physical and structural forms – is invoked to examine design characteristics of the internet that, in turn, reflect and provide opportunitie...

Resident involvement is a new trend in care homes. The PARTNER intervention aims to involve residents through collective action to improve their community life and wellbeing. The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the process of resident involvement via the PARTNER intervention, and into its perceived effects. A qualitative evaluation study was conducted, using participant obse...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to evaluate the factors involved in the decision making process of women in situation of interpersonal violence perpetrated by an intimate partner in search for domestic violence support services. METHODS Qualitative, descriptive and exploratory research. Sixteen women were interviewed through individual semi-structured interviews, at a Women's Reference Center in D...

study of collective actions is related to some of the most important issues in contemporary sociology such as cooperation, collective decision making, emergence of social norms etc. this paper in four steps presents a framework for studying collective actions. these steps are related to characteristics of collective actions (cooperation and common good), factors effecting the emergence of colle...

Developed empowerment theory and replicated previous research on citizen participation and perceived control Few investigators have designed studies that specifically test empowerment theory. This research further extends a theoretical model of psychological empowerment that includes intrapersonal, interactional, and behavioral components, by studying a large randomly selected urban and suburba...