Funk Laura M, Stajduhar Kelli I
University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Qual Health Res. 2009 Jun;19(6):859-67. doi: 10.1177/1049732309334105.
Family caregiving tends to involve strong and often competing emotional experiences. Most of our knowledge of caregiving stems from interview research, much of it cross-sectional in nature. In this article we explore the implications of interviews as a research method for understanding caregiving. Specifically, we address difficulties in interpreting participants' talk about caregiving when this talk is simultaneously an articulation of experience and an attempt to cope with that experience. Either uncritically accepting accounts as reflective of experience, without considering the role of coping, or making assumptions about the success of caregiver coping in this context, might be erroneous. Our own experiences of interviewing family caregivers in different research projects will be drawn upon as examples. We conclude by questioning the ability to draw conclusions about caregiving and/or caregiver coping based solely on interview research, and call for greater integration of observational and longitudinal methods in family caregiving research.
家庭照料往往涉及强烈且常常相互冲突的情感体验。我们关于照料的大部分知识源于访谈研究，其中许多本质上是横断面研究。在本文中，我们探讨访谈作为一种理解照料的研究方法所具有的意义。具体而言，当参与者关于照料的谈话同时是对经历的一种表达以及应对该经历的一种尝试时，我们要解决解读这种谈话时所面临的困难。要么不加批判地将叙述视为反映经历，而不考虑应对的作用，要么在此背景下对应对者应对成功与否做出假设，都可能是错误的。我们将借鉴自己在不同研究项目中访谈家庭照料者的经历作为例子。我们通过质疑仅基于访谈研究就得出关于照料和/或照料者应对的结论的能力来得出结论，并呼吁在家庭照料研究中更多地整合观察法和纵向研究方法。
