Living with asthma: the experiences of young people at home and at school (original) (raw)
Related papers
Parents' experiences of asthma: Process from chaos to coping
Nursing and Health Sciences, 2004
The aim of the present qualitative study was to describe nine parents' everyday experiences of living with a child suffering from asthma. Data were collected by means of in-depth interviews and phenomenological content analysis. Four main themes emerged: feelings of uncertainty, helplessness and guilt; the need for support and help from healthcare professionals; adaptation to everyday life; and the development of coping strategies. In addition, two subthemes; trying out and seeking information, emerged. Trying out was found to be an important strategy for parents in managing the illness. In encounters with healthcare professionals, parents felt that they were not respected and that their competence was questioned. In conclusion, this study emphasizes the importance of a mutual dialogue between healthcare professionals and parents to enable the parents to develop the competence necessary to care for their child.
Medication, chronic illness and identity: The perspective of people with asthma
Social Science & Medicine, 1997
The issue of compliance with prescribed medication has traditionally been dominated by the perspective of the health professional although increasingly sociologists, using qualitative methods, have begun to present the patients' point of view. However, little has been published on asthma, despite the numbers of people suffering from this chronic condition and the amount of medication regularly prescribed. This paper focuses on the perspective of a sample of S. Wales (U.K.) asthma patients who have all been prescribed prophylactic medication in the last 12 months and explores their attitudes to medication in the context of their everyday lives, using inductive qualitative research methods. Two main groups were identified: the deniers and the accepters. They differed fundamentally in their readiness to accept the identity of asthma sufferer which, in turn, was associated with very different beliefs about the nature of their problem and the meaning of the medication prescribed for it. There was also marked differences in their strategies of self-presentation and disclosure and their pattern of medication use, particularly for prophylactic medication. A third group, the pragmatists, were also identified as a possible sub-group of the accepter category who are less open within self-presentation and less consistent in their beliefs about asthma but do not reject the label entirely. Identity work, i.e. the way the respondents interpreted the social identity of asthma sufferers and managed to reconcile it with other social identities, is proposed as the most useful way of understanding the observed variation in the way people diagnosed as asthmatic conceptualise and use their medication. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd
Children's Experiences of Living With Asthma: Fear of Exacerbations and Being Ostracized
Journal of Pediatric Nursing, 2011
The aim was to explore children's experiences of asthma in order to tailor a learning program based on their perspectives. Fifteen children (7-10 yrs) were interviewed and they narrated about their drawings; a phenomenological and hermeneutical approach was used in the analysis. The findings are described in two themes with five subthemes: fear of exacerbation (bodily sensations, frightening experiences, loss of control) and fear of being ostracized (experiences of being excluded, dilemma of keeping the asthma secret or being open about). Drawings, as applied in the present study, are a good tool for initiating a dialogue with children.
Qualitative study of young people's and parents' beliefs about childhood asthma
The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 2003
Asthma continues to be a common childhood chronic illness managed principally in primary care. Self-management requires co-ordinated efforts of young people, carers and health professionals. Non-compliance occurs even when parents are supervising care, suggesting that decisions are made on the basis of beliefs that contrast with professional advice. Health professionals therefore need to understand the views of parents (or other carers) and patients to promote good self-management. Little attention has been given to carers' and young people's perspectives on asthma. To gain insights into the beliefs of a group of 25 young people aged nine to 16 years old and their carers about asthma and its management. Qualitative study using conversational-style interviews. Generally deprived urban areas of Greater Manchester. Interviews were conducted with 25 young people with asthma and separately with their carers. The interviews were analysed using the principles and procedures of grou...
The research presented here contributes to a developing sociological-phenomenological empirical corpus of literature by addressing the lived experience of asthma in non-élite sports participants and committed exercisers. Despite the prevalence of asthma and exercise-induced asthma/bronchoconstriction, there is a distinct lacuna in terms of qualitative research into living with asthma, and specifically in relation to participation in sports and physical cultures. Here we focus upon the aural dimension of asthma experiences, examining the role of ‘auditory attunement’ and ‘auditory work’ in sporting embodiment.
This paper, based on a qualitative research project in the UK, explores the ‘personal troubles’ encountered in the lived experience of asthma, drawing on an approach currently under-utilised in studies of asthma: vignettes. These were used as an elicitation technique in in-depth research with 19 frequent exercisers and sports participants with asthma. We describe and evaluate this approach as deployed in relation to a sociological and phenomenological study of the lived experience of asthma, and consider how employing vignette-based research can encourage people with asthma to reflect critically on their experiences and ways of being-in-the-world. This was found to be a powerful way of challenging taken-for-granted assumptions, and stimulating consideration of behaviour change. The findings we report here cohere around some of the principal themes that emerged from our data, including: asthma as ‘dys-ease’ in Leder’s (1990) terms, and feelings of being ‘out of control’; bodily attunement and learning corporeal control; somatic empathy, and the power of sharing stories and opening up dialogues (Allen-Collinson et al., 2016). Understanding the complexity of asthma experiences can be of sociological interest, we argue, as well as of great practical value both to those with asthma and also to healthcare and exercise professionals in tailoring more effective treatments.
Domestic Experiments: Familial Regimes of Coping with Childhood Asthma in New Zealand
Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 2014
In this article, I examine the self-positioning of many New Zealand mothers of children with asthma as parent-experts whose authority supersedes that of implementing the self-management strategies advocated by medical professionals. In a socio-political context that emphasizes neoliberal values of autonomy and self-responsibility, these parent-experts experiment with a variety of pharmaceutical regimes, determining familial modes of care that privilege the achievement of what they consider to be ‘normal childhoods’. While some families accept asthma as a chronic condition and encourage children to adopt standardized, daily preventative regimes, others craft alternative strategies of pharmaceutical use that allow them to experientially maintain asthma as a sporadic and temporary, if frequent and sometimes dramatic, interruption of everyday life. Childhood asthma care practices are thus not only vested in kinship networks, but often arise out of familial-based experiments whose goal is to determine regimes that enable the preservation of ‘normality’.