多様な対象に向けられるナーチュランスに関する研究 : 親準備期と親期に着目して

The purpose of this study is to investigate how women express their nurturance as some action in a given situation, setting various kinds of nurturance objects. A. Fogel, G. F. Melson & J. Mistry (1986) defined the concept of nurturance as fostering developmental change within the potentials of growth of the nurturance objects. Nurturant behaviors may depend on the kind of the objects: children, elderly people, sick people, injured people, disabled people, pets, and plants. With questionnaires, the author asked basic ideas of nurturance, direct assistance or staying watchful, to undergraduate female students, mothers having five year old or younger child as the first child, and mothers having fourteen year old or older child as the first child. Replies were 98, 86, and 92, respectively. The situations for nurturance in the questionnaire were broken down into urgent and nonurgent scenes with two levels of difficulty for the 7 kinds of objects. The following common traits were found in their behaviors: 1) To children, the tendency of staying watchful without rendering assistance in non-urgent situations or in non-difficult situations was strong. 2) To elderly people, sick people, injured people, and disabled people, the tendency of direct assistance was predominant, even when they seem to be able to overcome the situation. Further, this tendency 2) was strongly seen with respect to mothers with longer experiences of motherhood.