Abstract
The purpose of this study was to provide a hypothetical model of mothers' psychological growth resulting from the experience of accompanying their school phobic child to the school nurse's office. By adopting the Modified Grounded Theory Approach (M-GTA) to the protocols obtained through semi-structured interviews of seventeen mothers who experienced such a visit, four category groups, nineteen categories, and fifty-eight concepts were extracted. Selective coding revealed that mothers' psychological growth occurs in the three consecutive periods, namely, before, during and after attendance at the nurse's office, and that specific changes occur in the mothers' thoughts, feelings, and actions in each period. M-GTA also revealed that mothers who have accompanied their children show changes reflecting the experience of observing their child's behavior and experience of their child's interaction with the school nurses in charge of health education, compared with mothers of school phobic children who did not accompany their child on such a visit.
