DR.

CARLOS LANTING COLLEGE

COLLEGE OF NURSING

SCIENCE OF HUMANITARY HUMAN BEINGS

MARTHA E. ROGERS

BIOGRAPHY

 Was born on May 12, 1914 at Dallas, Texas, USA

 Earned her Diploma at Knoxville General Hospital School of Nursing in
1936
 Graduated in Public Health Nursing at George Peabody College, TN, in
1937
 Earned her MA at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York,
1945
 Earned her MPH at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 1952
 Finished her Doctorate in Nursing at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
1954
 Had her fellowship at American Academy of Nursing Position
 Was a Professor Emerita at the Division of Nursing, New York University,
 She was also a consultant and speaker
 Died on March 13, 1994

DESCRIPTION

Rogers’ theory defined Nursing as “an art and science that is humanistic and
humanitarian. It is directed toward the unitary human and is concerned with the
nature and direction of human development. The goal of nurses is to participate in the process of change.”

According to Rogers, the Science of Unitary Human Beings contains two dimensions: the science of nursing, which is the
knowledge specific to the field of nursing that comes from scientific research; and the art of nursing, which involves using
the science of nursing creatively to help better the life of the patient.

ASSUMPTIONS

 Man is a unified whole possessing his own integrity and manifesting characteristics that are more than and
different from the sum of his parts.
 Man and environment are continuously exchanging matter and energy with one another.
 The life process evolves irreversibly and unidirectionally along the space-time continuum.
 Pattern and organization identify the man and reflect his innovative wholeness.
 Man is characterized by the capacity for abstraction and imagery, language and thought sensation and emotion.

FIVE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE CONCEPTUAL SYSTEM

Energy Fields
The energy field is the fundamental unit of both the living and the non-living. It provides a way to view people and the
environment as irreducible wholes. The energy fields continuously vary in intensity, density, and extent.

/victoriatamayo 42
 DR. CARLOS LANTING COLLEGE
COLLEGE OF NURSING

SCIENCE OF HUMANITARY HUMAN BEINGS

MARTHA E. ROGERS
Pandimensionality
Pan-dimensionality is defined as “non-linear domain without spatial or temporal attributes.” The parameters that humans
use in language to describe events are arbitrary, and the present is relative; there is no temporal ordering of lives.
Synergy is defined as the unique behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by any behaviors of their component
functions taken separately.

Pattern
Rogers defined the pattern as the distinguishing characteristic of an energy field seen as a single wave. It is an
abstraction and gives identity to the field.

Unitary Persons
A person is defined as an indivisible, pan-dimensional energy field identified by a pattern, and manifesting characteristics
specific to the whole, and that can’t be predicted from knowledge of the parts. A person is also a unified whole, having its
own distinct characteristics that can’t be viewed by looking at, describing, or summarizing the parts.

Environment
“An irreducible, indivisible, pandimensional energy field identified by pattern and integral with the human field.”

PRINCIPLES

Principle of Homeodynamics
Homeodynamics should be understood as a dynamic version of homeostasis(a relatively steady state of internal operation
in the living system).

Principle of Reciprocy
Postulates the inseparability of man and environment and predicts that sequential changes in life process are continuous,
probabilistic revisions occurring out of the interactions between man and environment.

Principle of Synchrony
This principle predicts that change in human behavior will be determined by the simultaneous interaction of the actual
state of the human field and the actual state of the environmental field at any given point in space-time.

Principle of Resonancy
It is the identification of the human field and the environmental field by wave patterns manifesting continuous change from
longer waves of lower frequency to shorter waves of higher frequency.
Human beings are perceived as wave patterns and a variety of life rhythms can be likened to wave patterns. These
include things such as sleep-wake rhythms, hormone levels, and fluctuating emotional state (waves of joy or pain or
loneliness).
The changes that occur to these patterns of human beings are from lower to higher frequency patterns. Some examples
are seen below. These changes are postulated to express the continuous creative change in the flow of
human/environmental field patterning.

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 DR. CARLOS LANTING COLLEGE
COLLEGE OF NURSING

SCIENCE OF HUMANITARY HUMAN BEINGS

MARTHA E. ROGERS
MANIFESTATION OF FIELD PATTERNING IN UNITARY HUMAN BEINGS
Lower Frequency Higher Frequency Highest Frequency

Pragmatic Imaginative Visionary

Time experienced as slower Time experienced as faster Timelessness
Lesser diversity Greater diversity
Longer sleeping Longer waking Beyond walking
Longer rhythms Shorter rhythms Seems continuous
Slower motion Faster motion Seems continuous

Principle of Helicy
It is defined as continuous, innovative, unpredictable, increasing diversity of human and environmental field patterns.
Rogers saw helicy as an ordering of man’s evolutionary emergence. This principle underlies the idea that humans do
not regress but become increasingly diverse and complex.
She emphasized that this eliminates the idea of homeostasis. Human development is not static and humans do not ever
return to exactly the same place that they were before. Unitary persons, in their development, do not go backward.
This view of human development places positive light to aging. Humans are becoming more diverse and complex as
they age.

Principle of Integrality
It’s defined as continuous mutual human field and environmental field process. Integrality is derived from the word integral
to explain the essential relationship between the human and environmental fields. An example of this interaction is
below:

A child is playing outside in the sun on a bright summer day. The child gets sunburn. This might be perceived as the interaction between the child
and the sun. However, consider the mutual process between the child and the sun as occurring simultaneously and continuously over a lifetime.
Included in the process is everything from the necessity of the sun for life on this planet to Vitamin D absorption by the child to ongoing effects of
radiation on the skin to the child’s impact to the ozone layer.

NURSING METAPARADIGMS

Human – unitary human beings

A person is defined as an indivisible, pan-dimensional energy field identified by a pattern, and manifesting characteristics
specific to the whole, and that can’t be predicted from knowledge of the parts. A person is also a unified whole, having its
own distinct characteristics that can’t be viewed by looking at, describing, or summarizing the parts.

Health
Rogers defines health as an expression of the life process. It is the characteristics and behavior coming from the mutual,
simultaneous interaction of the human and environmental fields, and health and illness are part of the same continuum.
The multiple events occurring during the life process show the extent to which a person is achieving his or her maximum
health potential. The events vary in their expressions from greatest health to those conditions that are incompatible with
the maintaining life process.

/victoriatamayo 44
 DR. CARLOS LANTING COLLEGE
COLLEGE OF NURSING

SCIENCE OF HUMANITARY HUMAN BEINGS

MARTHA E. ROGERS

Nursing
It is the study of unitary, irreducible, indivisible human and environmental fields: people and their world. Rogers claims
that nursing exists to serve people, and the safe practice of nursing depends on the nature and amount of scientific
nursing knowledge the nurse brings to his or her practice

SCIENCE OF UNITARY HUMAN BEINGS AND NURSING PROCESS

The nursing process has three steps in Rogers’ Theory of Unitary Human Beings: 
1. Assessment
2. Voluntary mutual patterning
3. Evaluation

The areas of assessment are: the total pattern of events at any given point in space-time, simultaneous states of the
patient and his or her environment, rhythms of the life process, supplementary data, categorical disease entities,
subsystem pathology, and pattern appraisal. The assessment should be a comprehensive assessment of the human and
environmental fields.

Mutual patterning of the human and environmental fields includes:

 sharing knowledge
 offering choices
 empowering the patient
 fostering patterning
 evaluation
 repeat pattern appraisal, which includes nutrition, work/leisure activities, wake/sleep cycles, relationships, pain,
and fear/hopes
 identify dissonance and harmony
 validate appraisal with the patient
 self-reflection for the patient

THEORY ANALYSIS
 Rogers’ concepts provide a worldview from which nurses may derive theories and hypotheses and propose
relationships specific to different situations.
 Rogers’ theory is not directly testable due to lack of concrete hypotheses, but it is testable in principle.
 Rogers’ model does not define particular hypotheses or theories for it is an abstract, unified and highly derived
framework.
 Testing the concepts’ validity is questionable because its concepts are not directly measurable.
 The theory was believed to be profound and was too ambitious because the concepts are extremely abstract.
 Rogers claimed that nursing exists to serve people, however, nurses’ roles were not clearly defined.
 The purpose of nurses is to promote health and well-being for all persons wherever they are. However, Rogers’
model has no concrete definition of health state.

/victoriatamayo 45