What About People Our Age?

Applying Qualitative and Quantitative Methods to Uncover How Political Ads Alienate College Students

Summarize your understanding on review of research paper

Reference

Brown, J., Sorrell, J. H., McClaren, J., & Creswell, J. W. (2006). Waiting for a liver transplant. Qualitative health research, 16(1), 119-136.

Objective: Examine a phenomenological approach within a qualitative research based on the philosophy of Husserl towards the waiting of a liver transplant at the example of people with a liver defect. The experience of waiting for a transplantation includes transformations, doctors, teams and elation to despair, and the paradox of time. The essence of experience is considered under the theory of chronic illness.

The empirical literature on transcendental phenomenology, that is based on four basic assumptions:

1. Knowledge begins with the description of an experience
2. Phenomenology involves the attempt to suspend all judgments reality until judgments are based on more certainty
3. Reality of an object is linked to a person’s consciousness of it
4. Phenomenology demands the refusal of a subject-object dichotomy

The idea of the phenomenology is focusing on the construction of a meaning as a central human activity.

Husserl stated, that e.g. when we see a tree, then we watch the tree itself. We don´t see an image nor do we project a packet of sense data into a tree.

Model and research questions

Model: Waiting for a liver transplant.

Research questions: A. What dependencies exist between a phenomenological approach and a qualitative research? B. What factors give value to qualitative research based on interviews? C. What parameters are the most relevant for the research when examining findings, transformation, doctors and teams, loss, despair and elation to despair?

A qualitative analysis based on nine interviews with six patients at a large midwestern university medical center in a series of three interviews within 6 weeks, 6 months, and 12 months that were performed posttransplant, while the patients were retrospectively asked to talk about their pretransplant experience as well as their life during and after the transplantation.

Several studies were performed by using phenomenology, in addition to the research towards a grounded theory, have been conducted by the researchers. Data: Reliance was posed on non-numerical primary data.

Other researchers have performed a study by using a sample of 12 patients, one year after the transplantation was made.

The study was framed by the high rates of depression and suffering of patients when awaiting a liver transplantation. As a result of the study, three findings emerged to the disruption of participants’ life story:

1. The patients see themselves in terms of their laboratory results and not with a sense of themselves
2. Participants were preparing for a new life after the transplantation, by wondering on their next career, and simultaneously reflecting on other people´s imagination of them after death

Deep sense of loss and loss of vitality, autonomy, and future dreams while people were waiting for the transplantation.

All participants of the study were white, due to the majority of people on the wait list at the researched transplant center. The question is arising, whether a divergent cultural belief on with people of a different ethnic background about time and illness would result in similar results.