Narrative Research In Health And Illness

This comprehensive book celebrates the coming of age of narrativein health care. It uses narrative to go beyond the patient's storyand address social, cultural, ethical, psychological,organizational and linguistic issues. This book has been written to help health professionals andsocial scientists to use narrative more effectively in theireveryday work and writing. The book is split into three, comprehensive sections;Narratives, Counter-narratives and Meta-narratives.

Storytelling is an essential tool for reporting and illuminating the cultural contexts of health: the practices and behavior that groups of people share and that are defined by customs, language, and geography. This report reviews the literature on narrative research, offers some quality criteria for appraising it, and gives three detailed case examples: diet and nutrition, well-being, and mental health in refugees and asylum seekers. Storytelling and story interpretation belong to the humanistic disciplines and are not a pure science, although established techniques of social science can be applied to ensure rigor in sampling and data analysis. The case studies illustrate how narrative research can convey the individual experience of illness and well-being, thereby complementing and sometimes challenging epidemiological and public health evidence.

This comprehensive book celebrates the coming of age of narrative in health care. It uses narrative to go beyond the patient's story and address social, cultural, ethical, psychological, organizational and linguistic issues. This book has been written to help health professionals and social scientists to use narrative more effectively in their everyday work and writing. The book is split into three, comprehensive sections; Narratives, Counter-narratives and Meta-narratives.

What is it like to live with an illness? How do diagnostic procedures, treatments, and other encounters with medical institutions affect a patient's private and social life? By asking these types of questions, illness narratives have gained a reputation as a scientific domain in medicine in the last thirty years. Today, a patient's story plays an important role in doctor-patient communication and the development of a healing relationship. However, whereas patient experiences have been well acknowledged, methodologically reflected upon and widely collected as research data, less consideration has been invested in exploring how they work in practice. Used in the context of diagnosis, treatment, and teaching, patient stories give us a new perspective on how healthcare could be improved. Illness Narratives in Practice: Potentials and Challenges of Using Narratives in Health-related Contexts highlights the problems, challenges, and opportunities we face when using patient perspectives in practice and research in a clear format to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of this field. It investigates the epistemological foundations and communicational properties of illness narratives, as well as the pragmatic effects of using them as clinical and educational instruments. Significantly, it presents new examples from patient intakes and interviews that illustrate the disparity in communication between patients and medical professionals. The studies in this book also evaluate the experiences of medical practitioners and students who consciously use patient narratives as a tool for improved communication and diagnosis. Divided into eight sections with practical examples for medical teaching and practice, this book covers the use of patient narratives in communication training and decision making across medicine and psychotherapy. In addition, it reflects on the ethical aspects of working with a patient's personal experience of their illness, reports on cultural differences across the globe, and analyses how patients' stories are used in politics and the media. Written by scholars from multiple disciplines across clinical and theoretical fields, this rich resource provides a critical stance on the use of narratives in medical research, education, and practice.

This collection of essays examines the interrelations between illness, disability, health, society, and culture. The contributors examine how "narratives" have emerged and been utilized within these areas to help those who have experienced d injury, disability, dementia, pain, grief, or psychological trauma to express their stories. Encompassing clinical case studies, ethnographic field studies and autobiographical case studies, Health, Illness and Culture offers a broad overview and critical analysis of the present state of "illness narratives" within the fields of health and social welfare.

Narrative research is an increasingly popular way of carrying outqualitative research by analysing the stories or experience. Thefindings of this type of qualitative research can be used toimprove nursing education, nursing practice and patient care and toexplore the experience of illness and the interaction betweenprofessionals. Narrative Research in Nursing provides acomprehensive yet straightforward introduction to narrativeresearch which examines the skills needed to perform narrativeinterviews, analyse data, and publish results and enables nurseresearchers to use the method systematically and rigorously. Narrative Research in Nursing examines the nature of narratives andtheir role in the development of nursing and health care.Strategies and procedures are identified, including thepracticalities of sampling, data collection, analysis andpresentation of findings. The authors discuss authenticity ofevidence and ethical issues while also exploring problems andpracticalities inherent in narrative inquiry and its dissemination.Narrative Research in Nursing is a valuable resource for nursesinterested in writing and publishing narrative research.

Patients' perspectives on their experiences of illness and treatment are increasingly valued by the medical profession as a source of information to enhance professional development, peer support and the quality of care provided. This book explores the development of an in-depth, relational and reflexive approach to narrative inquiry, drawing on counselling and arts-based approaches to researching accounts of illness. The significance of patient stories is explored through narrative research conversations with people whose personal accounts of a range of conditions provide powerful insights into the impact of illness on identity, life stories and the experience of patienthood. It offers suggestions for using narrative methods in medical education and practice to help professionals to both attend to patients' narratives and reflect on their own stories. Developing a Narrative Approach to Healthcare Research will be of interest to educators, practitioners, students and researchers in healthcare and the social sciences. 'I will recommend this book to my students; I hope other healthcare professionals will do the same and that some, like me, will go on to explore how narrative and story can be harnessed to both explore experience and to teach within healthcare.' - from the Foreword by Karen Forbes 'I would recommend this book to everybody who is involved in caring for people who suffer serious illness - whether they are professionals, family or friends. I also recommend it to social scientists and health professionals who want to conduct research in ways that capture the richness of peoples' lived experience.' - Kim Etherington, Professor of Narrative and Life Story Research, University of Bristol, UK.

Edited by two leading general practitioners and with contributions from over 20 authors, this book covers a wide range of topics to do with narrative in medicine. It includes a wealth of real examples of patients narratives and addresses theoretical and practical issues including the use of narrative as a therapeutic tool, teaching narrative to students, philosophical issues, narrative in legal and ethical decisions, narrative in nursing, and the narrative medical record.