Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare

Getting out of our heads through qualitative research in healthcare

Warren Bareiss — 2024-06-20

Welcome to Volume 8 of Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare. Reading through each article, I am struck by a conundrum that, in a way, defines qualitative research. Qualitative research generally takes a phenomenological perspective, presenting and analyzing the “lived experience” of participants—a term that I see more and more and chafe against every time I read it. How can we really present the experience of anyone while necessarily imposing a variety of filters required to present that experience to our readers? That includes determining which topics are worthy of studying, what questions we ask, who our participants are, and how and what to analyze. Furthermore, we are constrained by traditions and biases in our various academic disciplines. I would even go so far as to say that even autoethnography is necessarily distanced from experience, if only by the slippage imposed by written language. [...]

Screen time, mute, mixed messages, and panic: An international auto-ethnographic study of knowledge workers during a pandemic

Mark Finney — 2024-05-07

The coronavirus pandemic provoked worldwide changes to the workplace, leading to rapid changes in lifestyles and working conditions. While organizations and governments struggled to develop regulations and policies, individuals were forced to find ways to manage work and life. During the pandemic and quarantine, a group of knowledge workers from around the world convened virtually and agreed to use qualitative autoethnographic methods to study how the quarantine disrupted their conventional patterns of work and care. In this article, we apply two communication perspectives—uncertainty reduction theory and resilience— to participant diaries to understand how participants represent internal and external stressors, the efforts diarists employed to overcome those stressors, and their varying success in doing so. Post-hoc application of these communication concepts suggests that the diarists, though privileged in some ways, were not exempt from the social, professional, and emotional consequences of the pandemic and that their efforts to enact resilience were unevenly successful, especially in relation to their use of communications technology. Diarists reported struggling with uncertainty at numerous levels and that uncertainty contributed to individual emotional and cultural distress. Disruptions to work, home, and communities significantly affected wellbeing and ability to cope with challenges. Added to this were the complex and competing roles that diarists felt as they struggled to work from home, parent, and remain engaged.

A qualitative analysis and evaluation of social support received after experiencing a broken marriage engagement and impacts on holistic health

Wendy Riemann — 2024-03-13

This study provides new insights into the role of social support in the largely unexplored field of broken marriage engagements and an individual’s wellbeing. The study extends the Optimal Matching Theory (OMT) and the research surrounding helpful, unhelpful, and mixed social support. It uses constant comparison to examine the social support messages individuals received after telling others their engagement ended, as described in 43, in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Six types of helpful support messengers, six types of unhelpful support messengers, and four mixed messenger types were found. Receiver-centric messengers were found more helpful than messengers who centered on their own feelings and needs, sometimes to the detriment of the receiver’s own wellbeing. Being present, thoughtful, and intentional with words, can have a positive impact on a person’s holistic health, regardless of whether the relationship is a weak-tie or strong-tie. Using study findings, the Broken Engagement Message Stoplight is proposed, detailing messages that are generally helpful to a person’s overall wellbeing, should likely be avoided, and messages that should be said cautiously when interacting with someone experiencing a broken engagement.

“I felt like a freak when I would go to the doctor”: Investigating healthcare experiences across the lifespan among older LGBT and transgender/gender diverse adults

Roni Diamant-Wilson — 2024-04-04

In the past several decades, the United States has enacted civil rights legislation protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) populations from discrimination, including enacting proactive healthcare laws such as the Affordable Care Act. However, given today’s divisive politics, LGBTQ people’s access to appropriate and respectful health care is precarious. This study explored the disconnections from and connections to health care and the respective health effects among two self-identified groups: i) older LGBT adults and ii) transgender and gender-diverse (TG/GD) adults. Using a life course perspective, qualitative data from 17 older LGBT and TG/GD participants were analyzed. Thematic and content analyses indicated that despite progress made, discrimination and prejudice in obtaining health care persist, particularly among TG/GD people of color. The results highlight the ongoing challenges LGBTQ populations face as they risk being denied care by healthcare providers and disconnected from the healthcare system.

Lessons learned from qualitative fieldwork in a multilingual setting

Shweta Jain Verma — 2024-03-22

Qualitative research conducted in a multilingual setting is an arduous, yet essential, endeavour. As part of my PhD research program, I set out to conduct qualitative process evaluation of a stroke trial in 11 languages in the Indian subcontinent. In this article, I reflect upon the challenges, oversights, and successes that I experienced in the hope of offering insight of use to fellow researchers conducting healthcare fieldwork in multicultural contexts where many languages are spoken. My account starts with a description of the setting’s context and the necessity of conducting research in multiple languages. I elaborate on the planning of the study which included selection of the sample and preparation of relevant documents, including informed consent in patients’ languages. Subsequent steps entailed submission and approval of requisite documents, setup and training of a research team, and conducting interviews using interpreters. During this process, I developed a hybrid technique for conducting interviews that reduced fatigue for both patient interviewees and interpreters while still yielding in-depth insights. Additionally, I discuss the benefits of engaging professional translators for performing translations. Finally, I introduce a stepwise approach to facilitate the thematic analysis of qualitative data. I believe this account will encourage and empower researchers to pave their own way while anticipating and preparing for potential obstacles when conducting research in similar settings.

Debating claims of fact in public health: A pedagogical activity

Julie Homchick Crowe — 2024-04-09

This pedagogical activity asks instructors or workshop administrators to guide students through the process of evaluating evidence used in recurring health misinformation. Taking an approach based in argumentation and debate, instructors will facilitate understanding of how to evaluate evidence using specific criteria. Students are asked to develop cases to refute or defend a factual claim about human health, construct oral and written arguments for their case, and share them with other students who will evaluate the strength and quality of evidence used by each side. Ultimately, students will learn to: i) Understand how arguments are constructed that both support and refute a health claim; ii) develop strategies to evaluate evidence used for both sides of a claim of fact; and iii) know how to identify health misinformation, particularly in an online context.