This thesis explores contrasting experiences of empowerment in health promotion as recounted by different groups of participants on an education programme addressing health promotion with older people in Romania during 1993-2002.
It presents the results of a longitudinal critical ethnographic approach, empowerment education programme and empowerment evaluation (Freire, 1972; Fetterman, 1993a; Tones and Green 2005). The elements of this thesis were informed by a constructivist approach to research and the presentation and style of the thesis reflects this orientation.
Between 1993 and 2002 data was collected from education programme participants (professionals, lay people and older people) using a variety of methods including observations, documentary analysis, focus groups, semi structured interviews and narratives.
Constant comparative analysis of the data during the empowerment education
programmes and the empowerment evaluation of the programmes led to the emergence of a stage-integrated scheme to explain their experiences, with critical junctures attached to each stage which moved the participants through the model.
Empowerment and the barriers to empowem1ent and change were identified and
explored largely in terms of the threat empowerment may pose to their everyday lives.
The subsequent theory suggests that the differences between individual empowerment and community / political empowerment could be explained largely in terms of the history of the Romanian political communist period and the post-communist period.
It is suggested that the empowerment evaluation programmes and the ethnographic approach helps to explain the shared experiences of empowerment in this Romanian context. It also has relevance for informing future health and social change in ways briefly explored in the concluding chapter.