Michael Fitzgerald - ‘Phenomenological interpretations of patient engagement in research’

<p>Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Michael Fitzgerald, Bruyère Research Institute. Fitzgerald’s co-authors are Esther Shoemaker, Simon Fraser University; Lisa Boucher, University of Ottawa; Claire Kendall, Bruyère Research Institute.</p> <p> </p> <p>ABSTRACT: This paper draws on Husserl’s notions of epoché and phenomenological reduction to interpret patient engagement in research. The epoché suspends or bracket naturalistic assumptions about the existence of the world, so as to allow phenomenological inquiry to focus on meaning or significance. Phenomenological reduction to the life-world, in turn, functions to restore the significance of the concrete world of basic life, i.e., to allow the phenomenologist access to the structures of meaning that are the basis for all inquiry (Luft 2004). In particular, it suspends the assumptions of the positive sciences. Patient engagement in research is an approach that includes patients and caregivers as partners on the research team. Arguably, this approach has become the standard for a wide variety, if not all, types of health research, driven in part by funding agency imperatives. Studies of this approach have argued that the significance of and motivation for engaging patients can be understood in terms of three sets of values: “moral or normative (e.g., empowerment and rights), instrumental or substantive (e.g., improving research quality), and process (e.g., having to do with research conduct)” (Kendall et al. 2018). However, further investigation is needed into the impact of patient engagement in research, and in particular how it affects health researchers’ own understanding of their research activities, exploration of which has so far been limited (Staley 2015; 2017). This paper proposes a phenomenological approach, in which patient engagement is seen as a transformation of research. We suggest that patient engagement in research can function as a