Moyra Allen’s ideas about the nature of health and nursing were revolutionary when her work began in the 1970s and remain relevant today as a means of generating knowledge about the nature of family health promotion and the nurse’s role in facilitating this process. In this article, efforts to refine and extend Allen’s early work as a basis for developing a more formal, testable theory are described. In this process, emphasis was placed on teasing out and defining relevant health concepts (i.e., health potential, health work, competence in health behavior, and health status) and constructing a model in which relationships between these concepts and situation-responsive nursing are proposed. Early testing of this model provides consistent support for hypothesized relationships between theoretical concepts in families experiencing varied life events that differ in terms of structure, stage of development, and socioeconomic status. Continuing challenges for theory development and research are considered.
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