I studied how school-age children perceived their physical condition after having recovered from an illness using the grounded theory.
I clarified the structure of the process how they perceived the change of their physical conditions during the time of a recovery and finally they could get a feeling of “all right” (Daijoubu).
I found 4 core categories that constituted the process, i.e., “what will be done to me?”, “acquiring the skill of protecting oneself”, “making friends with one's own body”, and “challenging again”, and a category related to this process, i.e., “adults' help is also necessary”. In this process, children were afraid of new experiences outside of their daily life, but they gradually noticed patterns of pain from the accumulation of painful experiences. They also began to interpret or expect pain on the basis of the patterns. As well they found a strategy to cope with it, and became able to incorporate physical discomfort into their daily life. However, if new problems that they have not encountered appear, they temporarily lose their control ability but eventually regain it. I extracted the sense of recovery perceived by these children from this structure and defined it as ‘Daijoubu’.

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The purpose of the present study was to describe and interpret the meaning of the life history of a female patient with malignant lymphoma who received peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.
The philosophical perspective of the present study was Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment. Data collection and analysis were performed according to the life history method.
The following research method was used: (1) The patient participated in semi-structured interviews about her process of survival. (2) The narrative of the patient's experience was recorded verbatim. (3) The life history of the patient was described according to the life history method.
During the interviews, the investigators aimed to understand one individual's experience with an illness from a counseling perspective.
As a result of the interpretation of interview data, the central theme of the patient's experience with her illness was understood as the “creation of a new self”. This central theme was structured based on 3 life stages and 3 sub-themes.
The recommendations for nursing practice that were derived from the patient's experience were recognizing the importance of providing psychological care for patients, providing psychological care that alleviates the stress felt by the patient's family, and developing nursing care that addresses the patient's suffering. In addition, the patient's experience emphasized the importance of providing long-term assistance for patients in order to identify the positive meaning of their illness and to allow them to live positively.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the powerlessness (the state in which an individual perceives a lack of personal control over certain events or situations that affects outlook, goals, and lifestyle) of patients with cardiomyopathy. The research was performed in a qualitative and inductive design. Participants in this study were 30 patients with cardiomyopathy, 26 men and 4 women. The average age was 54.4±2.06 (SE). The interview to the participants was semi-structured, and the content of the interview was analyzed according to the content analysis advocated by Krippendorff. 5 categories, [confusion for uncertainty of one's future], [consciousness of bearing the cross], [perception of being hit by troubles], [hope one's life to a desperate], and [perception of fading out in life] were extracted from analysis of participants' powerlessness. While participants gradually realize the illness after the diagnosis of cardiomyopathy, they perceive the illness holding the doubt, “Am I really sick?” Then the patients start to recognize affliction of the illness and even feel guilty thinking if the illness might cause negative ramifications to people in the surrounding, and blame themselves. In addition, we found the participants were fully conscious of their frail life while having a hopeless dream of surviving or being saved. These feelings identified their realization off difficulty of control for power and life. The further study need to find the nursing direction for the patients with cardiomyopathy who live feeling powerless by clarifying the aspects of patients' coping with the illness and by examining overall structure of patients' powerlessness and coping.

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This paper introduces a scale to measure the degree of identity formation among professional nurses, and also tests the scale's reliability and validity.
The Professional Identity Scale for Nurses (hereafter PISN) consists of 22 measured variables divided into 5 categories—sameness, consistency, self-confidence, self-esteem and adaptability—derived from Erikson's concept of Identity.
The reliability and validity of PISN were tested with a sampling study; questionnaire forms were sent to 252 registered nurses working in the same prefecture, and replies were classified into 5 ranks and scored.
Cronbach's α indicated 0.84, and 20 items were shown to belong to the first factor.
Those consequences not only indicate the reliability and unidimensionality of PISN, but also show that it has significant positive correlation with some earlier scales such as Rasmussen's Identity Scale, the Self-Esteem Scale, and the Adaptation Sense Degree.

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In high-risk treatment, although it is important to respect children's rights and to promote their involvement in treatment, cognitive ability in children and the influence of parental management should be questioned. To clarify the elements and processes of parental management which may correlate to children's participation in decision making in treatment, we conducted a prospective study using a qualitative inductive method. The subjects of this study were parents with children undergoing hematopoiesis stem cell transplantation.
The results showed the followings: Parents based their actions on “parental determination to transplantation” and must get child's assent to treatment. So parents emerge from “opinion on the child's decision making” and led to the cyclical process of “approach to the child's assent related treatment” that is to say, “encouraging the child to accept treatment”, “confirmation of the acceptance”. This process influence “evaluation of the child”-“earlier characteristics of the child”, “the child's grasp and decision”, “prospect of the child's response to encouragement”, and “parental retrospection”-“emotional turmoil of transplantation”, “awareness of the parental role”, “expected parental ability to confront”. This process implied “parental negotiations to induce the child's assent of treatment”.

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