Using care ethics to enhance qualitative research on rural aging and care

Stigma, surveillance, and wounded healing: Promoting a critical ethics of care in research with formerly incarcerated Black women

Black women experience myriad challenges post incarceration, from managing stigma within social relationships to navigating surveillance when interfacing with service systems. It is these challenges that also make them vulnerable participants in community-based research. With many of potential research harms not falling under the guidance of Institutional Review Boards, it is critical to explore how communities experiencing stigma and surveillance perceive their engagement in research. As such, this study explores how 28 justice-involved Black women experience the research process. Findings reveal that participants view the research context as spaces for reflecting on surveillance and stigma in ways that promote self-recovery. Moreover, they perceive the interview process to allow them to envision identities as wounded healers who use their pasts as mechanisms to help others. The study's implications for anti-oppressive inquiry underscore the need for researchers to employ ethical care and justice frameworks that center compassion, reflexivity, and equity throughout the process.

Testimonies and Healing: Anti-oppressive Research with Black Women and the Implications for Compassionate Ethical Care

Anti-oppressive qualitative inquiry can be a powerful tool for members of marginalized communities to engage in storytelling that is both therapeutic and transformative. For individuals navigating marginalization due to multiple systems of stigmatization, the process of telling their story offers the opportunity to engage in awareness raising and health promotion that can benefit their communities. Formerly incarcerated Black women are one such community experiencing multilevel marginalization. This essay explores ways in which the qualitative interview can provide contexts for women to name their experiences of oppression, reconstruct the meanings they attach to them, and channel their stories of navigating harm to promote the health of others. Given the legacy of research atrocities that have disproportionately harmed already-marginalized communities, this piece seeks to advance practices of ethical care and compassion in qualitative inquiry that promote greater health and the building of relational trust in both research and clinical settings.

Navigating Intersectional Stigma: Strategies for Coping Among Cisgender Women of Color

Intersectionality is a critical tool for understanding how socially constructed categories shape multiple dimensions of lived experience. In this study, we apply an intersectional lens to explore how women of color from two different contexts, Hyderabad, India and Chicago, Illinois, manage gendered forms of stigma and oppression as they converge with other devalued statuses, namely living with HIV or having a history of drug use or incarceration. Applying intersectional stigma as our conceptual framework, and drawing from transnational feminist perspectives, we identified two overarching themes. Women in both contexts combat stigma by employing strategies of concealment within their romantic and familial systems. Moreover, women's roles as mothers were critical sources for managing their complex illnesses and for accessing support. Using these experiences of stigma against women of color as our analytic lens, we offer an intersectional framework for qualitative health research involving marginalized cisgender women of color in transnational contexts.

A relational ethic of rural home support on two Gulf Island communities, 1978-2018

Since their widespread establishment in the 1970s, home support services across Canada have been subject to shifting state logics, policies, and funding models. The impacts and responses of local actors differ across historical, socio-cultural, and geographical settings. This paper traces the development and evolution of a small home support society on two rural islands off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. Using historical and current data sources, we demonstrate that local actors have consistently engaged a relational ethic that challenges neo-liberal discourses and practices. Our central thesis is that the islands' distinct social, cultural, and rural features set the context for particular constructions of relational care. We identify three themes central to a relational ethic of home support on two rural islands: the strength of intergenerational connections, community-embedded relationships, and care as compassionate civic engagement. Within each theme, we consider how shifting policy structures inform changes over time in the nature and delivery of home support. To conclude, we elaborate on the conditions that allow for relational care to flourish in a particular rural context, and on the potential relevance to other settings.

Using a Flexible Diary Method Rigorously and Sensitively With Family Carers

Health and social science researchers are increasingly interested in the range of new possibilities and benefits associated with diary methods, particularly using digital devices. In this article, we explore how a flexible diary method, which enables participants to choose the device (i.e., paper notebook, tablet, or computer) and medium (i.e., text, photographs, sketches) through which they narrate their experiences, can be used to promote sensitive and rigorous research engagement with family carers to people with dementia. We used a diary interview method with 10 carers over the course of 6 weeks to explore how they experience and interpret the changing behaviors of their cognitively impaired kin. We reflect on how the quality of diary data can be enhanced alongside the ethical dimensions of research with carer populations, through different forms of diary keeping, regular interaction with participants, reflexive practice, and follow-up interviews.

Dementia in rural settings: examining the experiences of former partners in care

Informal carers, also referred to as partners in care, provide the bulk of care to people living with dementia across a range of community settings; however, the changing experiences and contexts of providing informal care for people with dementia in rural settings are under-studied. Drawing on 27 semi-structured interviews with former partners in care in Southwestern and Northern Ontario, Canada, we examine experiences of providing and accessing care over the course of the condition and across various settings. Our findings illustrate the challenges associated with navigating the system of care, finding people who understand dementia in the surrounding community, negotiating hours of home support, facing resistance to respite from the person with dementia, and feeling pressured into long-term care. We argue that partners' time, bodies and choices are spatially constrained within rural and small-town settings and the current systems of home, community and long-term care.