The life span perspective: a developmental approach to community health nursing

Following the nursing theorists' tradition of using an interdisciplinary approach to community health model building, the concepts of the life span perspective on human development were applied to the practice of community health nursing. As with the perception of individual development from this perspective, communities are viewed as evolving over time, with changes occurring across levels of influence--human, societal, historical, and cultural. These levels are interdependent, and factors from any one or more can affect the growth and functioning of the community. Implied in this interdependence is the ability not only to intervene in a community's development, but to go beyond this and recognize that a community has a degree of control over its own development. To be accurate and thorough in working with communities, the community health nurse who takes a life span perspective must be cognizant of the fact that communities do exist in a continual, multilevel, interactive manner that develops through time. Demonstrating the practical use of this perspective, a model for the assessment phase of the nursing process as applied to community study was developed. A pilot study was performed using this model, and initial results suggest that taking a life span perspective toward community health is both valid and practical, and warrants further scholarly investigation.