OLFU

-Graduate School-
Behavioral System Model

Background
Dorothy Johnson was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1919. She was the youngest
in the family of seven. She obtains her Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee and her Master in Public Health from
Harvard University in Boston Massachusetts. She began publishing her ideas about
nursing soon after graduation from Vanderbilt. Most of her education career was in
Pediatric Nursing at University of California, Los Angeles. She withdrew from academe
as a Professor Emeritus at January 1, 1971.
Dorothy Johnson has influenced nursing through her publications since the
1950s. Through her career, Johnson has made her cause on the importance of Research-
Based Knowledge about the effect of the nursing care on clients. She was early advocate
of Nursing as a Science as well as an Art. She also assumed that nursing has a body of
knowledge reflecting both the science and the art. From the beginning, Johnson
projected that the science of nursing necessary for effective nursing care included a
mixture of concept drawn from basic and applied sciences.
In 1961, Johnson that nursing care facilitated the clients maintenance of a state of
equilibrium. Johnson projected that clients were stressed by a stimulus of either an
internal or external nature. These stressful stimuli shaped such conflict, or tension, in
the patient that a state of disequilibrium, or a balance. First, nursing care should offer
support of the clients normal defenses and adaptive process.
In 1992, Johnson uttered that much of her thinking was influenced by Florence
Nightingale. While reading Nightingales Notes on Nursing, she found that Nightingale
placed importance on the primary needs of the people rather that the disease process. She
also noted that Nightingale gave a little bit of importance on the connection of the person
to the environment rather than the disease to the process. In the 1950s and 1960s, as
Johnson enlarged her model, an escalating number of observational studies on the child
and adult behavioral pattern were available. During these same years, the General
System Theory was also discussed frequently. All these experiences influenced Johnson
in the development of her Behavioral System Model.
In 1968, Johnson first proposed her model of nursing care as the nurturing of the
competent and helpful behavioral functioning in the patient to avoid illness.
Consequently, the patient is seen as a behavioral system with several subsystems. At this
point, Johnson began to join concepts related to system models into her work. Johnsons
combination of systems into her work was further demonstrated by her statement that
nursing was concerned with man as incorporated whole, and this is the specific
knowledge nurses must require.
In 1980, Johnson made in print her conceptualization of the Behavioral System
Model for Nursing. The first work published b Johnson that defines her definition of the
Behavioral System Model. The evolution of this complex model is clearly
demonstrated in the progression of Johnsons ideas from work published in the 1950s to
her latest available work published in 1980.