Gomersall, T and Madill, A (2015) Chronotope disruption as a sensitizing concept for understanding chronic illness narratives. Health Psychology, 34 (4). 407 - 416. ISSN 0278-6133
Abstract
Objectives: This article aims to elaborate chronotope disruption -a changed relation to time and space- as a sensitizing concept for understanding chronic illness narratives. Methods: Sixteen men and 16 women with Type 2 diabetes were purposefully sampled. Each was interviewed about his or her experience of diabetes self-management using the biographical-narrative interview method. Transcripts were inspected for key moments defined as emotionally laden stories relevant to the purpose of the research. We present dialogically inflected discursive analysis of exemplar extracts. Results: The analysis demonstrates how the concept of chronotope disruption helps identify, and understand, important aspects of patients' chronic illness narratives. First, we investigate how medical advice can conflict with embodied experience and how progressive bodily deterioration can provoke a reevaluation of past illness (self-mis)management. Second, the increasing temporal and spatial intrusion of chronic illness into participants' lives is examined. Finally, we focus on the masquerade of health as an attempt to manage, hide, or deny that one is physically challenged. Conclusions: Chronotope disruption offers a useful sensitizing concept for approaching chronic illness narratives and around which to organize analytical insights and to develop practice. Chronotope analysis fills an important gap in the science through compensating current health sciences' focus on rationality, cognition, and prospective time (prediction) with a patient-oriented focus on emotionality, embodiment, and retrospective time (nostalgia). Chronotope disruption could be used to develop practice by gaining empathic understanding of patients' life-worlds and provides a tool to examine how new technologies change the way in which the chronically ill have "being" in the world.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2014 The Author(s). This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. |
Keywords: | Diabetes; Self-management; Chronotope; Illness narratives; Qualitative methods |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Psychology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 25 Sep 2015 13:42 |
Last Modified: | 01 Mar 2019 13:06 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0000151 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Psychological Association |
Identification Number: | 10.1037/hea0000151 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:85122 |