Occupational therapy and structural constructivism



In addition to occupational therapy research, I am also studying philosophy, such as structural constructivism, pragmatism, and phenomenology.

Pragmatism and phenomenology are famous worldwide, but structural constructivism is not well known.

The structural constructivism is a new philosophy developed by Dr. Takeo Saijo in japan.

This consists of various philosophical principles to overcome the belief conflict in human science, such as Husserl & Seiji Takeda's phenomenology, Saussure’s general linguistics, Kiyohiko Ikeda's Structuralist Philosophy of Science, Rombach's structural ontology, and so on.

Belief conflict is defined as a state of opposition between behaviors or recognitions or thoughts.

I consider that There is an identity crisis of the profession as an example of belief conflict in occupational therapy.

The identity crisis of the OT was caused by a reductionist view on occupation and occupational therapy.

In the background, there are meta-theoretical conflicts such as reductionism and holism.




In answer to this problem, various models such as MOHO and CMOP-E have been proposed.

In addition, Japanese occupational therapy has the problem of conflict between Western culture and Oriental culture.

The river model was proposed as one of answer to this problem.

However, I consider that the belief conflict in occupational therapy has not been philosophically resolved fundamentally.

On the other hand, structural constructivism can dissolve to philosophically the belief conflict of occupational therapy.

I developed dissolution approach for belief conflict (DAB) based on structural constructivism.

DAB is a methodology to utilize philosophy in practice to overcome the belief conflict.

Moreover, DAB was applied to organize occupation-based practice 2.0 (OBP2.0) which is the theory to solve belief conflict of occupational therapy by developed Dr. Teraoka and me.

Structural constructivism will be contributing to further development of occupational therapy.

Reference
  1. Kyougoku M, Teraoka M, Masuda N, Ooura M, Abe Y (2015) Development of the Assessment of Belief Conflict in Relationship-14 (ABCR-14). PLoS ONE 10(8): e0129349. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129349
  2. Teraoka M, Kyougoku M (2015) Development of the Final Version of the Classification and Assessment of Occupational Dysfunction Scale. PLoS ONE 10(8): e0134695. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0134695
  3. Saijo T (2014) What Makes a Flexible and Functional Organization?: Project Fumbaro Eastern Japan driven by Structural Constructivism.