Using interpretative phenomenological analysis to inform physiotherapy practice: An introduction with reference to the lived experience of cerebellar ataxia

The attached file is a pre-published version of the full and final paper which can be found at the link below.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Qualitative research methods that focus on the lived experience of people with health conditions are relatively underutilised in physiotherapy research. This article aims to introduce interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), a research methodology oriented toward exploring and understanding the experience of a particular phenomenon (e.g., living with spinal cord injury or chronic pain, or being the carer of someone with a particular health condition). Researchers using IPA try to find out how people make sense of their experiences and the meanings they attach to them. The findings from IPA research are highly nuanced and offer a fine grained understanding that can be used to contextualise existing quantitative research, to inform understanding of novel or underresearched topics or, in their own right, to provoke a reappraisal of what is considered known about a specified phenomenon. We advocate IPA as a useful and accessible approach to qualitative research that can be used in the clinical setting to inform physiotherapy practice and the development of services from the perspective of individuals with particular health conditions.This article is available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

Parental depression following the early diagnosis of cystic fibrosis: a matched prospective study

To assess risks for parental depression following the diagnosis of cystic fibrosis (CF) in a child. Study design Matched cohort study in NW England; 45 parental couples with a child diagnosed with CF were compared with 45 control couples matching for age, sex, and position in the family of the index child. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) with a clinical cut-off ≥13 for dysphoria (mild depression) was the main outcome. A stratified analysis was conducted using the Mantel-Haenszel risk-ratio estimator (RRMH) with eight strata for each of the matching variable combinations. Results Heterogeneity was found within the dataset. Parents with a child with CF ≤9 months of age at baseline had an elevated prospective risk of depression (mothers RRMH [95% confidence interval(CI)] = 2·6[1·05,6·42], fathers RRMH [95%CI] = 2·26 [0·97,5·28]). The absence of a group effect for depression at follow-up after adjusting for the matching (mothers RRMH [95%CI] = 1·1 [0·59,2·05], fathers RRMH [95%CI] = 1·42 [0·66,3·08]) masked this heterogeneity. Conclusion This hypothesis-generating finding suggests that parents may be more vulnerable to depression when their child is diagnosed with a life-shortening condition during the first few months of life. Mood in parents of infants diagnosed early needs to be monitored longitudinally and preventative strategies devised