Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Trancu Notes
Trancu Notes
Leininger used the term transcultural nursing (TCN) to describe the blending of nursing and
anthropology into an area of specialization within the discipline of nursing.
Leininger established TCN as a theory and evidence-based formal area of study and practice
within nursing that focuses on people’s culturally based beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and
practices related to health, illness, healing, and human caring.
Through her observations, while working as a nurse, Madeleine Leininger identified a lack of
cultural and care knowledge as the missing component to a nurse’s understanding of the many
variations required inpatient care to support compliance, healing, and wellness, which led her to
develop the theory of Transcultural Nursing also known as Culture Care Theory.
This theory attempts to provide culturally congruent nursing care through “cognitively based
assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling acts or decisions that are mostly tailor-made to fit
with the individual, group’s, or institution’s cultural values, beliefs, and lifeways.”
Leininger’s theory’s main focus is for nursing care to fit with or have beneficial meaning and
health outcomes for people of different or similar cultural backgrounds. With these, she has
developed the Sunrise Model in a logical order to demonstrate the interrelationships of the
concepts in her theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality.
While working in a child guidance home during the 1950s, Madeleine Leininger experienced
what she described as a cultural shock when she realized that children’s recurrent behavioral
patterns appeared to have a cultural basis. She identified a lack of cultural and care knowledge as
the missing link to nursing
The goal of TCN is to develop a scientific and humanistic body of knowledge in order to provide
culture-specific and culture-universal nursing care practices for individuals, families, groups,
communities, and institutions of similar and diverse cultures.
Culture-specific refers to particular values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that tend to be
special or unique to a group and that do not tend to be shared with members of other cultures.
Culture-universal refers to the commonly shared values, norms of behavior, and life patterns
that are similarly held among cultures about human behavior and lifestyles.
For example, although the need for food is a culture- universal, there are culture-specifics that
determine what items are considered to be edible; acceptable methods used to prepare and eat
meals; rules concerning who eats with whom, the frequency of meals, and gender- and age-
related rules governing who eats first and last at meal time; and the amount of food that
individuals are expected to consume.
Anthropology, an academic discipline that is concerned with the scientific study of humans, past
and present. Anthropology builds on knowledge from the physical, biological, and social sciences
as well as the humanities. A central concern of anthropologists is the application of knowledge to
the solution of human problems.
The earliest recorded definition comes from a 19th century British pioneer in the field of
anthropology named Edward Tylor, who defines culture as the complex whole that includes
knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by
members of a society (Tylor, 1871).
Leininger defines culture as the “learned, shared, and transmitted values, beliefs, norms, and
lifeways of a particular group of people that guide thinking, decisions, and actions in a patterned
way…
Culture is the blueprint that provides the broadest and most comprehensive means to know,
explain, and predict people’s lifeways over time and in different geographic locations”
(McFarland & Wehbe-Alamah, 2015a, p. 10).
Culture influences a person’s definition of health and illness, including when it is appropriate to
self-treat and when the illness is sufficiently serious to seek assistance from one or more healers
outside of the immediate family.
The choice of healer and length of time a person is allowed to recover, after the birth of a baby or
following the onset of an illness, are culturally determined. How a person behaves during an
illness and the help rendered by others in facilitating healing also are culturally determined.
Culture determines who is permitted, or expected, to care for someone who is ill. Similarly,
culture determines when a person is declared well and when they are healthy enough to resume
activities of daily living and/or return to work. When someone is dying, culture often determines
where, how, and with whom the person will spend his or her final hours, days, or weeks
In a classic study of culture by the anthropologist Edward Hall (1984), three levels of culture are
identified: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
The primary level of culture refers to the implicit rules known and followed by members of the
group, but seldom stated or made explicit, to outsiders.
The secondary level refers to underlying rules and assumptions that are known to members of the
group but rarely shared with outsiders. The primary and secondary levels are the most deeply
rooted and most difficult to change. The tertiary level refers to the explicit or public face that is
visible to outsiders, including dress, rituals, cuisine, and festivals.
The term subculture refers to groups that have values and norms that are distinct from those held
by the majority within a wider society. Members of subcultures have their own unique shared set
of customs, attitudes, and values, often accompanied by group-specific language, jargon, and/or
slang that sets them apart from others.
A subculture can be organized around a common activity, occupation, age, ethnic background,
race, religion, or any other unifying social condition.
Spanish language and culture (Morris, 2015).
Ethnicity is defined as the perception of oneself and a sense of belonging to a particular ethnic
group or groups. It can also mean feeling that one does not belong to any group because of
multiethnicity. It includes commitment to and involvement in cultural customs and rituals.
I’ve read that Madeleine Leinenger was appointed to a Child Guidance Home wherein andun yung mga
batang may behavioral problems and there she experienced the so called “culture shock”. She realized
that the children’s behavioral patterns is affiliated to their cultural background. And from that she found
out what is lacking sa nursing care that time, which is yung cultural awareness ng isang nurse. That is
why as a nurse we should be culturally aware or to have enough knowledge about different culture for us
to provide a culturally congruent care. And base on that experience, Leinenger then formulated the theory
of Transcultural Nursing.