Qualitative Health Research Conference October 2017
Back in 2013 when I attended the Qualitative Health Research Conference for the first time I was surprised to find that some of the work that apparently was being regarded as qualitative — and even as radical — was pretty pedestrian by our standards in the School of Education. I suppose that, having been involved with the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry since its beginnings in 2005, my benchmarks of what equals innovative had shifted and I was also forgetting both the struggle to gain recognition faced by qualitative educational researchers in the UK as recently as the early 1980s, and the power of the scientific tradition continuing to influence health researchers.
Anyway: the big surprise for me in 2017 was that the oral and poster presentations Mel Hall and I were giving at the conference were the only ones dealing with dementia. This hadn’t been the case in 2013 or in 2015 and one would not expect it to be given the incidence of dementia and the massive implications the condition has, throughout the world, for health and social care policy and practice, for lives in the community, and for national budgets. This year sexuality and transgender issues were the hot topics.
Our presentations, coming out of our Alzheimer’s Society funded study, The perceptions and experiences of children and young people who have a parent with dementia, focused on researching and reporting ‘taboo’ issues and the grief of children and young people who have a parent with young onset dementia.
Standing by a poster gives a chance to engage in conversation and enables people to ask questions or talk about personal experiences they might not want to voice in an oral session. As is always the case I was told a lot of dementia stories and there were tears. People also shared stories of feeling inhibited to talk frankly about their negative experiences of dementia and other health related issues. I found, as I had in the past, that some people were not aware that there are young onset variants of dementia or that dementia is terminal. The young people who took part in our project were very angry about public ignorance and the dominant perception that dementia means Alzheimer’s Disease affecting older people. That some health related researchers, practitioners, educators and academics should also hold these views was disturbing — and there was more of this in the questions following my talk. In and of itself, being able to address misconceptions was a justification for attending the conference!
Pat Sikes
