Celebration of Scholars
Understanding the Feelings of Being a Burden: A Qualitative Study of Young Adults With Chronic Illness.
Name:
Ashley Lundell
Major: Psychological Sciences
Hometown: N. Aurora, IL
Faculty Sponsor:
Kateryna Sylaska
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: SURE
Funding: SURE
Abstract
This study illuminates the barriers to help-seeking for young-adults with a chronic illness and the burdensome feelings seeking help produces. Social support is necessary for a person with a chronic illness to attain substantial well-being (Merianos et al., 2015). Individuals with this support have exhibited increased social, emotional, and physical health (Frolich, 2014). While access to social support is often available, studies on the help-seeking behavior of young-adults with mental-illnesses and young-adults who have experienced sexual dating violence have found that these individuals faced common barriers of public stigma, a diminished sense of importance, fear, stress, and burdensome feelings which directly impeded their ability to seek help (Gulliver et al. 2010; Fernet et al. 2019).
While research on the help-seeking behavior of young-adults with a chronic illness does not exist en masse, we believe that our findings will be similar to that of Fernet et al. (2019) and Gulliver et al. (2010); however, we will also investigate the complexities of these burdensome feelings. We aim to generate a more nuanced understanding of chronically ill individuals’ experiences and explore their generalizability.
We have already conducted and transcribed 14 over-the-phone interviews to understand these experiences. Each interview is 20-30 minutes in length. Interviews were generally semi-unstructured, using guiding questions to explore participants’ experiences organically. In these interviews, we probed participants’ help-seeking experiences, barriers to help-seeking, and burdensome feelings.
In the analysis phase, we currently employ the emic perspective to foster a full understanding of the participant’s point of view during their help-seeking process. We are also taking an interpretive approach to examine the barriers to help-seeking and help-receiving experienced by this population.
At this time, we have recorded and transcribed all 14 interviews and have begun the process of analyzing and generating themes. Some promising initial themes include feared violation of autonomy, informational fatigue, burdensome feelings stemming from fear of inconvenience, and shame. The knowledge we accrue from this study will benefit individuals with chronic illness as we intend to find solutions to their help-seeking hesitations and illuminate the intricacies of burdensome feelings.