What is it about?
How do people use their homes to create security, well-being, and feelings of togetherness—even in the face of chronic illness? How do they cope with adversities and stress that may bring insecurity and tension into their everyday lives at home? Using the Emotional Map of the Home Interview (EMHI) method, we explored emotionally significant experiences within the family home of 23 adults representing ten families with one chronically ill adult family member with either epilepsy or chronic back pain. EMHI is a qualitative interviewing method in which participants are initially asked to place predefined positive and negative experiences on drawn diagrams of their homes. According to the stories of the respondents, their family homes had a profound impact on their environmental and emotional self-regulation as well as on dyadic coping, the process by which partners cope together with one partner’s chronic illness. They revealed formerly hidden aspects of dyadic coping with chronic illness: the role of environmental cues, represented by the family home in this study, in perceptions of stress and the coordinated use of spatial-environmental contexts to engage the appropriate self-regulatory strategies for coping with illness-related stress. The findings also demonstrate the utility of EMHI as an assessment tool and provide meaningful theoretical and practical information about dyadic coping among couples living with chronic disease.
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Why is it important?
Managing a chronic illness requires a systematic effort from the person affected as well as their close family and friends. Our study emphasizes the significance of considering the physical surroundings while trying to comprehend these processes. The process of dyadic coping is reliant on and includes the physical environment, and the family home is a particularly important place in this regard.
Perspectives
This was the first publication in which we presented the Emotional Map of the Home interview procedure to an international audience. This qualitative method is part of our experience mapping approach, which uses the environmentally embedded aspects of human behavior and experience to uncover essential subjective and interpersonal functioning processes. And the journey has just begun.
Dr. Viola Sallay
University of Szeged / Szegedi Tudományegyetem
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Strategies of Dyadic Coping and Self-Regulation in the Family Homes of Chronically Ill Persons: A Qualitative Research Study Using the Emotional Map of the Home Interview Method, Frontiers in Psychology, February 2019, Frontiers,
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00403.
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