Browsing by Author "Tuck, Brian William"

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    "It's just me" : a grounded theory of the experience of being a long term exerciser : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2004) Tuck, Brian William
    Exercise has been linked to a range of health benefits. Despite significant research into this relationship many of its dynamics remain a mystery. Almost all of this research has been quantitative in orientation with little emphasis given to the experiences of the exercisers' themselves. This study focuses on the lived experiences of eight long-term exercisers using a hermeneutic grounded theory methodology to collect, collate, explore and interpret their accounts of it. In arriving at themes that meaningfully describe these experiences this project was a collaborative effort between the co-researchers and myself to negotiate a shared understanding of what exercising means for us. These themes include exercising outcomes and background influences that combine to produce exercising experiences that are both self-defining and self-enhancing. Seen this way our exercising can be viewed as a three-stage process of self-discovery involving initiation, exploration and integration. This understanding of long-term exercise provides the opportunity to gain further insight into the dynamics of our adherence and longevity. In producing a public record of this shared understanding this study also validates and gives voice to our experiences.
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    Putting 'Humpty' together again : a testifying of the embodied nature of human experiencing : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2009) Tuck, Brian William
    The complex functioning of the human body produces the biological, historical and environmental contingencies of lived existence. These experiences of embodiment are chiasmic, dialectical and dialogical, and underpin the narrative dilemmas we create through the storied nature of our attempts to make sense of them. In testifying my own embodiment this autobiographical form of sensual scholarship emphasizes the subjective basis for my body’s psychology. By developing the complicating action segments of my life story told through interview data into a chronologically-ordered and textually- layered account of personally significant memories, I craft a story of my panicking body. My upbringing was influenced by discourses that reinforced parental and family affiliation at the expense of my feeling body. Unravelling my need to exercise as a contingency of this affiliation provides retrospective meaning to the distress my panicking caused. Situating my feelings, thoughts, emotions and actions within the broader constraints of my family’s history, community, religion and culture reveals the contingent nature of my embodiment. Describing the shifting contingencies of a life lived since my upbringing in the small, rural town of Inglewood, New Zealand, provides the opportunity to recognize and to re-align the dialectics of identity that help to make up my body’s psychology. Juxtaposing this narrative meaning-making are my revelations of experiential integration achieved through the flow of exercise. Understood as an extension of my body’s fundamental sensuality, this evolutionally-refined capacity for engagement underpins my lived experiencing. Together these sentient and reflexive forms of testimony confirm the inherence of my sensuality and the circumstance of self-hood, and invite you, the reader, to explore the workings of your own body. By revealing the sensual and symbolic strands of my embodiment this story of human contingency reveals something of the fleshy consciousness that we all share, not by speaking for anyone else, but by calling attention to the taken-for-granted nature of its unfolding. By arguing for a psychology more relevant to lived experiencing, my thesis questions the body of Western science and, in particular, psychology’s version of it. Articulating the felt nature of my experiencing situates my mind back in my body and, in doing so, fleshes out its psychology. While the insights shared here are personal, the relevance of the felt-body is found in the ways it becomes discoursed and narrated.