What is it about?
People with Inflammatory Bowel Disease endure a chronic, incurable, stigmatising condition. Most expect family to be supportive, but this is not always the case. Stigma from family members exerts a unique impact that is different from stigma arising from other sources. The paper presents participants experiences, and discusses the meaning of these experiences in relation to sociological, stigma and nursing theories. Messages for health and social care practitioners include the appreciation that family support for a person with a chronic illness cannot and should not be assumed. Strategies for determining whether the chronically ill person does or does not have family support, and for helping families come to understand the support needs of their sick family member, are proposed.
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Why is it important?
The paper presents the first (known) description of kinship stigma, and sets this apart from other types of stigma commonly reported in the literature. Messages for health and social care practitioners include the appreciation that family support for a person with a chronic illness cannot and should not be assumed. Strategies for determining whether the chronically ill person does or does not have family support, and for helping families come to understand the support needs of their sick family member, are proposed.
Perspectives
This is a lovely piece of hermeneutic phenomenology research, and is particularly strong in demonstrating the relationship between philosophy, methodology and method. As such, it provides an excellent example of how to deliver a robust hermentic phenomenology study for students who may be new to the discipline. The topic builds on my earlier work on stigma in IBD and adds to the body of knowledge which evidences what life is like for those enduring this debilitating condition.
Lesley Dibley
University of Greenwich
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: When Family Don’t Acknowledge: A Hermeneutic Study of the Experience of Kinship Stigma in Community-Dwelling People With Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Qualitative Health Research, March 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1049732319831795.
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