The meaning of hope for individuals with spinal cord injury in Brazil

Abstract

Aim: To understand the meaning of hope among individuals with spinal cord injury. Design: A qualitative study employing the ethnographic method was used, with 18 individuals. Method: Participant observation was chosen to understand individuals with spinal cord injury and interviews were used to elicit information about the hope experience. The data were analysed using Ernst Bloch's theory of hope. Findings: Participants constructed their own personality and sense of self, including their hopes for their future, based on their life before their injury. Life after experiencing spinal cord injury highlighted the limitations and potentialities of their hopes. Using a sense of hope to establish goals for the future helped participants overcome obstacles. Conclusion: Hope in people with spinal cord injury helped them cope with the fundamental changes to their daily lives. Hope played an important role in articulating coping strategies and setting and achieving goals. These findings may help nurses understand the limits and potentialities of hope as an instigator of goals in the daily life of individuals with spinal cord injury.

Restored Life of Elite Athletes after Spinal Cord Injury

“…The SCI that emerged, although it was a hindrance to self-realization and caused internal conflicts of tension, still constituted the identity status quo of our subjects. Constructing one’s personality and sense of self along with hopes for the future based on pre-injury life was also observed among the respondents of Zuchetto et al’s study [ 35 ]. Sport identification can affect individuals experiencing SCI in two ways.…”

“…Erik Erikson believes that identity is a sense of being special while at the same time being integrated into a social frame of reference in which one plays a role [ 35 ]. In the literature, there is a notion of group identity, which is a way of defining oneself by belonging to different types of social groups.…”

What Will the Post-pandemic World Be Like? A Qualitative Study on the Perceptions of Brazilians with Spinal Cord Injury

“…The study participants and the literature alike define the civilizational crisis as a process in recreating concepts of human dignity (15). Therefore, hope emerges as the possibility to feedback this anguish from past reality and build a future based on relations of law and social conscience (16).…”

“…People see possibilities among difficulties, and this hope is founded on the creative impetus of people, who can then find ways to reinvent their own existence and keep trying. For this reason, optimistic people with SCI do not disregard the facts that hinder their confrontations in the face of the pandemic; instead, they recognize the obstacles as social expressions of transformation (16).…”

“…The hope of people with SCI helps make fundamental changes in their daily lives; moreover, this driving force is an effective coping strategy for establishing and achieving goals (16). Recognizing the human priority of reflecting on the historical trajectory and constructing new concepts also fosters more dignified relationships based on trust, respect, and social esteem.…”