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QUESTION: What are the perceptions of adults living with chronic pain?
Design
Eidetic (descriptive) phenomenology.
Setting
USA.
Participants
13 adults (age range 27–79 y, 69% women, 92% white, 77% married) who were >18 years of age, willing to talk about their lived experiences, and with a duration of non-malignant chronic pain ranging from 7 months to 41 years, were recruited via a newspaper article and network sampling. Pain was most often located in the back, but also in the shoulder, arm, neck, hip, leg, jaw, and ear.
Methods
In individual 1–2 hour interviews, participants were asked to describe what it was like to live with chronic pain. The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. The transcriptions were analysed independently by the researcher, and then read aloud and discussed by an interdisciplinary research group. Global themes were clustered to produce a thematic structure of the phenomenon.
Main findings
Findings fit into the context of the 3 existential grounds …
Footnotes
Source of funding: no external funding.
For correspondence: Dr S P Thomas, 351 Nursing, College of Nursing, 1200 Volunteer Blvd, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA. Fax +1 865 974 3569.