Emotions and chronic illness.

The experience of chronic illness is often emotionally challenging. People respond to these challenges in very different ways yet their responses are inevitably shaped by their resources and social position, the wider environment and clinical, personal and societal reactions to their symptoms and diagnosis (or lack of diagnosis). This special issue of Chronic Illness features six papers, which all consider how people experiencing chronic illness talk about, and live with, emotions in different cultural contexts. We include papers from researchers in four countries: Japan, Israel, Germany and the UK. All of the researchers are members of the DIPEx International (DI) collaboration of qualitative health researchers and health professionals who have been inspired by the UK project, which produces www.healthtalkonline.org and www.youthhealthtalk.org. The first UK collections were published in 2001 and now include over 70 different health and illness sections. Similar studies have been conducted for sister websites in Australia, Japan, Korea, Spain and Germany. Projects are underway in the Netherlands, Israel and Canada and planned in many other countries. All of the DI projects use the same qualitative research methods: each collection involves a diverse, maximum variation sample of interviews, collected and analysed by experienced academic social scientists. Researchers travel throughout their country conducting digital video or audio (depending on the participant’s preference) recorded interviews with between 40 and 50 participants. People are interviewed at a place of their choice, usually their home; we avoid clinical settings. The interviews share a similar structure. First, the researcher invites the participant to tell the story of what has happened since, for example, they first suspected a problem. When the respondent indicates that this, the ‘narrative section’, is complete (in our experience this might take anything from 5min to 5 h) the researcher uses prompts and questions in a semi-structured section of the interview. Sometimes more than one interview is needed. The narrative section of the interview is intended to provide a space for the participant to tell their story and to identify the participants’ own priorities, rather than to elicit responses to a more narrowly focussed agenda. Cultural variations in responses to this kind of interview are likely but, while the research interview is arguably a western construction, storytelling is a feature of all human societies. Chronic Illness 8(3) 159–162 ! The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1742395312451281 chi.sagepub.com