REVIEW OF TIME “WHILE WAITING: PATIENTS’ EXPERIENCES OF SCHEDULED SURGERY.”
Carr, Teucher, and Casson (2014) studied the time aspects that patients experience while waiting for scheduled surgery. The authors used interactive phenomenological analysis (IPA) and utilized purposive sampling so as to get participants with different chronological time. IPA entails an analysis of how people make sense of situations in a particular context and, therefore, is quite open to creativity. The research approach is right since grounded theory would have limited the creativity of the researchers. Similarly, the study does not aim at differentiating the experience among cultures and, therefore, ethnography would not apply. However, that does not dismiss that there could be cultural variations in the experiences that people have while waiting for a surgery. A case study that involves direct observations could not work since the variables in the research do not directly observable characteristics.
Ethical issues involve informed consent. The authors gave details to the participants and entered into verbal, and non-verbal agreement i.e. signing consent forms. Additionally, the researchers undertook to maintain the privacy of the patients that they included in the consent agreement.
The change of research design may require a modification of the problem or questions under study. For this case, the authors could modify the focus and include measurable variables. For example, the participants may quantify the time drag i.e. a week may seem like fourteen days, or a month, two months, etc. Additionally, the meaningfulness of time may be attached to a value in terms of foregone productivity. In this respect, if one could not work as they used to, the value of the lost would add a quantitative aspect. However, that may change the focus of the study slightly since the way people experience situations is very subjective quantitatively.
Reference
Carr T., Teucher U. C., and Casson A. G. (2014). Time While Waiting: Patients’ Experiences of Scheduled Surgery. Qualitative Health Research 2014, Vol. 24(12) 1673–1685 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1049732314549022
