An Occupation-Based Framework for Changing Human Occupational Behavior to Address Critical Global Issues

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the Modified Instrumentalism in Occupational Therapy (MIOT) in facilitating change in occupational choices and performance patterns to help address global issues of concern to humanity. Such issues include poverty, diseases, environmental destruction and climate change, overpopulation, corruption and institutional dysfunction. The MIOT is an occupation-based framework for individual empowerment which is based on the pragmatic notion that the mind (and ideas or intellectual activities of the mind, including scientific investigation) is an instrument to help humans shape the environment to ensure that it is suitable for their survival. The investigation was a mixed method embedded multiple-case study with an experimental-type pretest-posttest and naturalistic-type phenomenological designs. Three graduate occupational therapy students from a mid-western university in the USA participated in the study. Our findings indicated that participants' occupational choices and performance patterns changed after intervention guided using MIOT guidelines so that they engaged more frequently in occupations chat were likely to impact global issues positively. We concluded that the MIOT was a potentially useful tool that occupational therapists and scientists could use to guide meaningful occupation-¬based interventions to help ameliorate global issues of concern.