Publications by authors named "Judith Ward"

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to examine the clinical reasoning of an occupational therapist in group practice in mental health. It emerged from a larger phenomenological study of expert occupational therapy practitioners in community mental health.

Method: Data were gathered through intensive, semi-structured interviews with 1 day of participant observation.

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Objective: The purpose of this study was to better understand occupational therapists' experiences of making a difference in parent-child relationships.

Method: In this qualitative, instrumental case study, occupational therapists working in early intervention were asked to reflect on and describe occasions in which they believed that they made a real difference in parent-child relationships. The primary investigator interviewed nine experienced pediatric occupational therapists.

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Although considerable research has been conducted to identify children's and adolescents' language of pain, research is lacking regarding a method to quantify the pain quality described by this language. Three descriptive studies involving 1223 children, aged 8-17 years, were conducted in school and hospital settings. The aims were to develop and examine the validity and reliability of a word list for measuring pain quality that was free of age, gender, and ethnic biases.

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In a study to determine how children describe the experience of pain, we queried a convenience sample of 100 children in hospitals and 114 children in church and private schools who were between 9 and 12 years old. The questions were designed to seek correlations by age among boys and girls, and between hospitalized and non-hospitalized children that would aid health professionals in strategies that will identify and assist the child who is in pain. The preliminary results show that children clearly describe pain, that there are no appreciable differences by age groups, but that children who are hospitalized describe pain differently from children who are not.

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