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Interviewing families can be daunting but careful planning can produce outcomes that are satisfying for the researcher and the family that has shared its time and life, concludes Julie G Donalek
key words
* family
* family theory
* interview
* qualitative methods
Introduction
Family researchers enter a sacred space in which the most intimate, formative and sustaining processes of human existence take place. Shared, multigenerational family interviews have a strong potential to capture some part of those processes. Using my experience in research with families responding to a parent's chronic illness, I will describe in this paper approaches to thorough preparation and successful implementation of family interviews, the management of data and the creation not only of insightful descriptions of family life but also of positive, nurturing encounters for these families.
In 2003, Daly wrote: 'By foregrounding the processes, negotiations and shared meanings in families, rather than focusing on individuals within families or aggregate patterns in family behaviour, we can centralize the dynamics of "family" in our family theory'. Yet. while family therapists routinely incorporate collective family interviews into practice and family researchers have called for their increased use (Bell et al 2000, Friedman et al 2003, Baumann 2006), relatively few nurse-researchers attempt this approach. In many studies, 'family data' emerge instead from interviews with one or two family members attempting to report for the entire family. Researchers who choose a more inclusive approach sometimes interview more members but commonly interview each member separately or, at most, as a dyad, then integrate findings into a description of the family's response as a whole. Data collected in this manner have value but do not fully reflect the family's collective experience (Åstedt-Kurki et al 2001).
A definition of family
Researchers begin with a clear definition of their phenomena of Interest. Thoughtful reflection on the meaning of 'family' helps to clarify all phases of the research process. In the face of diversity in what is meant by family, any attempt to develop an acceptable structural definition is futile. Instead, family is better defined by what it does. A family is a self-defined social unit whose members may be biologically or legally related and live together and who have a shared reality and ongoing formation of meaning...