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Chronic Illness Experience: Insights from a Metastudy

University of British Columbia School of Nursing

Barbara Paterson

UBC School of Nursing

Sonia Acorn

UBC School of Nursing

Connie Canam

UBC School of Nursing

Gloria Joachim

UBC School of Nursing

Carol Jillings

UBC School of Nursing

Concurrent with the recent enthusiasm for qualitative research in the health fields, an energetic call for methods by which to synthesize the knowledge has been generated on various substantive topics. Although there is an emerging literature on meta-analysis and meta-synthesis, many authors overestimate the simplicity of such approaches and erroneously assume that useful knowledge can be synthesized from limited collections of study reports without a thorough analysis of their theoretical, methodological, and contextual foundations and features. In this article, the authors report some of the insights obtained from an extensive and exhaustive metastudy of qualitative studies of chronic illness experience. Their findings reveal the complexities inherent not only in any phenomenon of interest to health researchers but also in the study of how we have come to know what we think we know about it.

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