SURGICAL PATIENTS' NARRATIVES RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS TESTING IN NARRATIVE MEDICINE
SURGICAL PATIENTS' NARRATIVES RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS TESTING IN NARRATIVE MEDICINE

Summary/Abstract: The pretesting stage of the interview guide is an intermediate phase, to verify the quality of the collected data, to calibrate the interview guide and the research methodology if needed (Chelcea, 2001). The medical research area is extensive, but at the same time challenging to explore, though the researcher has to receive its validation from a "gatekeeper," in this case, a cardiovascular surgeon specializing in thoracic surgery. For the analysis, the collected data, both in the pretesting stage of the results obtained after mapping the interview guide and in the final phase of data analysis, we used various methods in combination, starting with the narrative review of the interviews, as a way of reflection on the information received, as stated by the authors of the study "Making sense of stories: A rhetorical approach to narrative analysis" (Feldman et al. 2004). Narrative data are experiences transposed into discourse and transcribed. Each interview contains the narrative elements we reflected upon and present in a revised way (as the essence of narrative analysis is to reformulate patients' experiences obtained in a medical context). At the same time, the qualified analysis of manually entered data was used, without the use of specialized software (coding, thematic organization of identified elements and conceptual mapping), participatory observation, ethnographic items, social documents (confidential access to patients' medical records and their medical history). For the present research, we choose the epistemological coding (Saldana 2009), which I consider useful to understand a phenomenon - respectively how doctor-patient communications take place and what are the problems encountered in the communication process, how can be identified, organized, and how they can resolve for the benefit of parents and physicians.

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