Book Summary:
During the past decade, many people have experienced increasing ill-health with symptoms of psycho-social stress such as fatigue, sleeping disorders, burn out and exhaustion. Today it is common for fewer people to do more work and more people to do less work. Both conditions can have a negative influence on people's self-reliance and social support systems. To study health and ill-health demands a holistic perspective involving multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary efforts with observational and experimental designs. Today, such multiplicity is becoming increasingly accepted within different research traditions. Traditional analysis methods --longitudinal and experimental studies--confirm and generalize damage to health but ignore the meanings people give to their experiences and the way in which they interpret them. Traditional methods can be complemented with qualitative analysis methods to focus more deeply on the individual's perspective in health research. The study of small sample sizes is cost-effrective and generates valuable information for future studies. This book is the result of the First Nordic Interdisciplinary Conference on Qualitative Methods in the Health field. Researchers from different disciplines--domestic science, ethnography, medicine, nursing, pedagogy, physiotherapy, psychology,public health, sociology and sports science--show how qualitative analysis methods can be used in health research. Both the theoretical background and the practical use of qualitative methods contribute to a deeper understanding of the implications of this methodology as well as to an understanding of similarities and differences among different approaches. |