Objectives To draw on narrative interviews with patients with lung cancer and to explore their perceptions and experience of stigma. Design Qualitative study. Setting United Kingdom. Participants 45 patients with lung cancer recruited through several sources.

Qualitative analysis of patients' perspectives of illness can illuminate numerous issues that are important for medical education, some of which are unlikely to arise in the clinical encounter. Qualitative studies can also cover a much broader range of experiences - of both common and rare disease - than clinicians will see in practice. The DIPEx website is based on qualitative analysis of collections of interviews, illustrated with hundreds of video and audio clips, and is an innovative resource for medical education.

We report a comparative keyword analysis of interviews and Internet postings involving people with breast and prostate cancer and discussion of sexual health. Interviewees produce retrospective accounts, their content guided by interviewers' questions, which might elicit rich biographical and contextual details. Internet exchanges concern participants' current experiences and contain detailed accounts of disease processes, medical procedures, bodily processes, and, in the case of sexual health, sexual practices. They are used by participants to exchange information and support in a relatively anonymous context. Because of the ease with which large amounts of such archived Internet materials can be accessed and analyzed, this source has considerable potential for direct observation of illness experiences, although some disadvantages also exist. This reverses an earlier situation where observational research was more laborious than qualitative interviews. Observational material for research purposes is, through the Internet, now easy to obtain and produces naturalistic data.

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