Occupational Science: Academic Innovation in the Service of Occupational Therapy’s Future

TLDR

Occupational science is a nascent discipline that systematically studies humans as occupational beings, with a new doctoral program at USC emphasizing multidimensional descriptions of occupation across the lifespan. This paper defines occupational science and distinguishes it from other social sciences. The authors present a general systems model as a heuristic to explain occupation and organize knowledge in occupational science. Occupational science’s development benefits occupational therapy by meeting the need for doctoral faculty, generating basic science research, and justifying and potentially enhancing practice.

Abstract

Abstract Occupational science is a new scientific discipline that is defined as the systematic study of the human as an occupational being. A doctoral program in occupational science has been established at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, With its emphasis on the provision of a multidimensional description of the substrates, form, function, meaning, and sociocultural and historical contexts of occupation, occupational science emphasizes the ability of humans throughout the life span to actively pursue and orchestrate occupations. In this paper, occupational science is described, defined, and distinguished from other social sciences. A general systems model is presented as a heuristic to explain occupation and organize knowledge in occupational science. The development of occupational science offers several key benefits to the profession of occupational therapy, including (a) fulfillment of the demand for doctoral-level faculty members in colleges and universities; (b) the generation of needed basic science research; and (c) the justification for and potential enhancement of practice.