Imogene Martina King

a. Background of the Imogene Martina King

👼 BORN: January 30, 1923, West Point, Iowa
👼 She is the youngest among her siblings.
 EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
 1945 – She completed her diploma in nursing
education at St. Johns Hospital in St. Louis,
Missouri.
 1957 – She received her BS and MS in nursing from
St. Louis University.
 1961 – She obtained her Doctorate in Education from Columbia University, N.Y
 She has practiced as a staff nurse, nurse educator, and nurse administrator.
 She formulated her theory while she was an associate professor of nursing at Loyola University in
Chicago.
 This was at the time nursing was emerging as a profession and some nurses sought to challenge the
existing role of nurses.
 King began her work in nursing theory with a conceptual framework.
 King considers her theory as a deviation from systems theory, with emphasis on interaction theory.
 1981 – she refined her concepts into a nursing theory that consisted of the following basis:
1. An open system framework as the basis of goal attainment.
2. Nursing as a major system within the health care system.
3. Nursing process emphasis on interpersonal processes.
 1958 - The doctoral dissertation of Kaufman in 1958 enables her to explore concepts of perception,
time, and stress.
 1961 - The research conducted at Yale University School of Nursing to test the theory of the
deliberative nursing process in 1961, which was founded by Ida Jean Orlando-Pelletier, led her to
think of new ideas about nursing.
 According to Takahashi (1992), King and Peplau emphasized the connections between their works
concerning the patient outcome.
 A review of her 1971 book by Rosemary Ellis encouraged her to continue her work by deriving a
theory from the General Systems Framework that results in the creation of the Theory of Goal
Attainment.
☠️DEATH: December 24, 1997
☠️CAUSE OF DEATH: Stroke
b. Focus of the Theory of Goal Attainment
“Nursing is a process of action, reaction, and interaction whereby nurse and client share information about their
perception in the nursing situation.”
 In the early 1960s, Imogene King introduced the theory of goal attainment in the nursing profession.
 The King's work depicts a dynamic, interpersonal relationship in which a patient grows and develops
to attain distinct life goals. She explains that factors that can affect the attainment of goals are roles,
stress, space, time, and learning.
 The personal, interpersonal, and social systems are the three interacting systems King identified.
These systems contain their own set of concepts. For instance, the personal system includes
perception, self, growth and development, body image, space, time, and learning; whereas, the
interpersonal comprises the concepts of interaction, communication, transaction, role, and stress.
Meanwhile, the social system is consists of the organization, authority, power, status, and decision-
making.
I. Personal System
 Personal systems pertain to individuals who are rational, sentient, social beings.
a. Perception
 Perception is the method of organizing, interpreting, and transforming information from
sense data and memory, which gives meaning to one's experience, represents one's image of
reality, and affects one's behavior.
b. Self
 Self refers to the composite of thoughts and feelings that form the person's awareness of
individual existence, of who and what he or she is.
c. Growth and Development
 The cellular, molecular, and behavioral changes in human beings, which are a function of
genetic endowment, meaningful and satisfying experiences, and an environment conducive
to helping individuals move toward maturity.
d. Body Image
 Body image is the perceptions of the person of his or her body.
e. Space
 The term space represents the physical area called territory that exists in all directions.
f. Time
 King defined time as the duration between the occurrence of one event and the occurrence of
another event.
g. Learning
 Learning is the act of gaining knowledge.
II. Interpersonal System
 Interactions form the interpersonal system. The quantity of interacting individuals
determines the complexity of the interactions. With the use of the sub-concepts such as
communication, interaction, role, stress, and transaction, the difficulty in understanding the
idea of this system eases.
 a. Communication
 Communication refers to the vehicle by which human relations are developed and
maintained. It includes intrapersonal, interpersonal, verbal, and nonverbal communications.
King emphasizes that collaboration between the nurse and the patient is necessary to attain
the goals.
b. Interaction
 Interactions are the acts of two or more persons in mutual presence. It is a sequence of verbal
and nonverbal behaviors that are goal-directed.
c. Transaction
 The transaction is a process of interaction in which human beings communicate with the
environment to achieve goals that are valued; goal-directed human behaviors.
d. Role
 King defines the role as a set of behaviors expected of a person occupying a position in a
social system.
e. Stress
 Stress pertains to the dynamic state whereby a human being interacts with the environment
to maintain balance for growth, development, and performance, involving an exchange of
energy and information between the person and the environment for regulation and control
of stressors. Coping is a way of dealing with stress.
III. Social System
 Social System is the third interacting system in King's grand theory. It depicts the interaction
of the nurses with co-workers, superiors, subordinates, and the client environment in
general. They share common goals, values, and interests, which contributes to the creation of
a framework for social interaction and relationships and establishes rules of behavior and
courses of action (King, 1971). Furthermore, King describes the social system as the organized
boundary systems of social roles, behaviors, and practices developed to maintain values and
the mechanisms to govern the practices and roles.
a. Authority
 The transactional process characterized by active, reciprocal relations in which members' values,
backgrounds, and perceptions play a role in defining, validating, and accepting the authority of
individuals within an organization.
b. Power
 King describes power as the process whereby one or more persons influence other persons in a
situation.
c. Status
Status signifies the position of an individual in a group or a group with other groups in an
organization.
d. Decision making
 The dynamic and systematic process by which goal-directed choice of perceived alternatives is
made and acted upon by individuals or groups to answer a question and attain a goal.
e. Control
 Control refers to the state of being in charge of something.
King stated that "Although personal systems and social systems influence the quality of care, the
major elements in a theory of goal attainment are discovered in the interpersonal systems in which two
people, who are usually strangers, come together in a health care organization to help and to be helped to
maintain a state of health that permits functioning in roles" (King, 1981 p. 142). She openly describes the
salience of the interpersonal system in her conceptual framework due to its greatest impact on the
development of her work. King concluded that the goal of nursing is to help individuals maintain their
health so they can function in their roles (King, 1981). The transactions happen to set goals related to the
health of the patient. Nursing's focus is on the care of the patient, which aim is the health care of patients
and groups of patients.
c. Metaparadigm in Nursing
Person
 The person is existing in an open system as a spiritual being and rational thinker that makes choices,
selects alternative courses of action, and can record their history through their language and symbols,
unique, holistic, and have different needs, wants, and goals. According to Imogene King, human
being has three fundamental needs:
1. Information on health that can be accessed and utilized when needed
2. Care that aims to prevent illness
3. Care in times of illness/helplessness
Nursing
 Imogene King defines nursing as an act wherein the nurse interacts and communicates with the
client. The nurse assists the patient by identifying the existing health condition, exploring, and
agreeing on activities to promote health. The goal of the nurse in Imogene King’s theory is to help the
client maintain health through health promotion and maintenance, restoration, and caring for the sick
and dying.
Health
 Health includes the dynamic life experiences of a human being that implies continuous adjustment to
stressors in the internal and external environment through optimum use of one’s resources to achieve
maximum potential for daily living.
Environment
 According to Imogene King, the background for human interactions is the environment. The
environment classifies into two divisions, internal and external. The first classification is the internal
environment, which transforms energy to enable a person to adjust to continuous external
environmental changes. The external environment includes formal and informal organizations. King
highlights the presence of the nurse in the patient’s environment.
d. Acceptance by the Community
Research
 The theory of goal attainment paves the way for the development of middle-range nursing theories
such as Model for Multicultural Nursing Practice (Rooda,1992), Theory of Personal System Empathy
(Alligood & May 2000), and Theory of Family Health (Doornbos, 2000).

Education
 It serves as a framework for the baccalaureate program at Ohio State University School of Nursing. It
implements a systematic manner of viewing the nursing profession, organizing a body of knowledge
for nursing, and clarifying nursing as a discipline. Also, the educational reform results in nursing
education in Sweden.
Practice
 One of the proofs of the usefulness of the theory in practice is it individualized plans of care while
encouraging active participation from clients in decision making. It also becomes a model for bedside
nursing practice in the hospital setting (Coker & Schreiber, 1990). Moreover, King's work managed
care programs in hospital settings (Hampton,1994).

References

Gonzalo, A. (2019, September 12). Imogene King: Theory of goal attainment. Retrieved from
https://nurseslabs.com/imogene-m-kings-theory-goal-attainment/

Gragera, J. (2013, June 26). Imogene King: Goal attainment theory. Retrieved from
https://www.slideshare.net/jen316/imogene-king-23548267

Necor, J. (2014, Jun 30). Imogene King’s goal attainment theory. Retrieved from
https://www.slideshare.net/JosephineAnnNecor/04-imogene-kings-goal-attainment-theory