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Researchers who work in partnership with older adults in participatory studies often experience various advantages, but also complex ethical questions or even encounter obstacles during the research process. This paper aims to provide insights into the value of an intersectional lens in participatory research to understand how power plays out within a mixed research team of academic and community co-researchers.

Four academic researchers reflected in a case-study approach in a dialogical way on two critical case examples with the most learning potential by written dialogical and via face-to-face meetings in duos or trios. This study used an intersectionality-informed analysis.

This study shows that the intersectional lens helped the authors to understand the interactions of key players in the study and their different social locations. Intersections of age, gender, ethnicity/class and professional status stood out as categories in conflict. In hindsight, forms of privilege and oppression became more apparent. The authors also understood that they reproduced traditional power dynamics within the group of co-researchers and between academic and community co-researchers that did not match their mission for horizontal relations. This study showed that academics, although they wanted to work toward social inclusion and equality, were bystanders and people who reproduced power relations at several crucial moments. This was disempowering for certain older individuals and social groups and marginalized their voices and interests.

Till now, not many scholars wrote in-depth about race- and age-related tensions in partnerships in participatory action research or related approaches, especially not about tensions in research with older people.

This study aims to explore the perspectives of mental health professionals who are in a process of integrating their own experiential knowledge in their professional role. This study considers implications for identity, dilemmas and challenges within the broader organization, when bringing experiential knowledge to practice.

As part of a participatory action research approach, qualitative methods have been used, such as in-depth interviews, discussions and observations during training and project team.

The actual use of experiential knowledge by mental health care professionals in their work affected four levels: their personal–professional development; the relation with service users; the relation with colleagues; and their position in the organization.

Because of its limited context, this study may lack generalisability and further research with regard to psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as perceptions from users, is desirable.

According to this study, social change starts from a bottom-up movement and synchronously should be facilitated by top-down policy. A dialogue with academic mental health professionals seems crucial to integrate this source of knowledge. Active collaboration with peer workers and supervisors is desired as well.

Professionals with lived experiences play an important role in working recovery-oriented, demonstrating bravery and resilience. Having dealt with mental health distress, they risked stigma and rejections when introducing this as a type of knowledge in current mental health service culture. Next to trainings to facilitate the personal–professional process, investments in the entire organization are needed to transform governance, policy and ethics.

This study aims to explore the perspectives of psychiatrists with lived experiences and what their considerations are upon integrating the personal into the professional realm.

As part of a qualitative participatory research approach, participant observations during two years in peer supervision sessions (15 sessions with 8 psychiatrists with lived experiences), additional interviews as part of member feedback and a focus group were thematically analysed.

Although the decision to become a psychiatrist was often related to personal experiences with mental distress and some feel the need to integrate the personal into the professional, the actual use of lived experiences appears still in its early stages of development. Findings reveal three main considerations related to the personal (3.1), professionality (3.2) and clinical relevance (3.3) comprising 11 facilitators and 9 barriers to harness lived experiences.

This study was conducted locally and there are no similar comparable studies known. It was small in its size due to its qualitative nature and with a homogeneous group and therefore may lack generalisability.

Future directions to further overcome shame and stigma and discover the potential of lived experiences are directed to practice, education and research.

Psychiatrists with lived experiences valued the integration of experiential knowledge into the professional realm, even though being still under development. The peer supervision setting in this study was experienced as a safe space to share personal experiences with vulnerability and suffering rather than a technical disclosure. It re-sensitised participants to their personal narratives, unleashing its demystifying, destigmatising and humanising potential.

Purpose – In this chapter, we explore how normalization of exclusionary practices and of privilege for seemingly same professionals and disadvantage for seemingly different professionals in academic healthcare organizations can be challenged via meaningful culturalization in the interference zone between system and life world, subsequently developing space for belonging and difference.

Methodology – This nested case study focusses on professionals’ narratives from one specific setting (team) within the broader research and research field of the Dutch academic hospital (Abma & Stake, 2014). We followed a responsive design, conducting interviews with cultural minority and majority professionals and recording participant observations.

Findings – In the Netherlands, the instrumental, system-inspired business model of diversity is reflected in two discourses in academic hospitals: first, an ideology of equality as sameness, and second, professionalism as neutral, rational, impersonal and decontextual. Due to these discourses, cultural minority professionals can be identified as ‘different’ and evaluated as less professional than cultural majority, or seemingly ‘same’, professionals. Furthermore, life world values of trust and connectedness, and professionals’ emotions and social contexts are devalued, and professionals’ desire to belong comes under pressure.

Value – Diversity management from a system-based logic can never be successful. Instead, system norms of productivity and efficiency need to be reconnected to life world values of connectivity, personal recognition, embodied knowledge and taking time to reflect. Working towards alternative safe spaces that generate transformative meaningful culturalization and may enable structural inclusion of minority professionals further entails critical reflexivity on power dynamics and sameness–difference hierarchy in the academic hospital.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of chronic illness on a couple’s life experiences over a period of 40 years. It critically examines the assumptions of the public health discourse in the light of this couple’s attempts to balance love and health care within their relationship.

The couple, the first two authors, put themselves under the magnifying glass. They arranged for a dialogic encounter and built a co-constructed auto-ethnography. This study consists of a “raw” narrative and a reflection. This reflexive part was added by the third author, interpreting the couple’s experiences applying in a sociocultural way theories of ethical care. This sheds light on ethical care aspects encountered in the couple’s balancing of love and health care.

This study shows that the couple copes with adversity rather than being in control of it. Nonetheless their love relationship appears to be flourishing, thanks to their acknowledgement of the importance of mutual caring.

The current public health discourse puts the couple’s private love relationship under pressure. It turns a blind eye towards the difficulties they experience with the contemporary “self-management” paradigm. The couple feels that the government is an interloper intruding into their private relationship. This creates tension, friction, anxiety, as well as increasing the burden of the illness and makes them feel insecure and unsafe.

The novel method used in this study offers a rare and deep insight.