Explicitation Interview: A Method for Collecting First Person Perspectives on Living Alone in Old Age

Abstract

How can older adults (OAs) live at home alone when they have health problems? Growing numbers of OAs live with chronic health problems and yet are determined to remain in their homes as long as possible. The risks associated with living alone are a source of grave concern not only for OAs but also for those around them. Knowing how OAs cope with the risks they face is a central issue for home care and support services. The present article describes the advantages of coupling an existential anthropology approach with an explicitation interview (EI) methodology as a means of understanding the details of how OAs manage their lives at home alone. Using this introspective methodology, we encouraged 20 participants aged 80 years or older to share very detailed elements of their subjective daily life experiences of coping with the risks inherent to their solitary lifestyles. Different types of risk coexisted with one another; some risks were physical, while others were existential. Physical risks appeared to be subordinate to other major fears: loss of identity, disintegration of one's internal coherence, lack of autonomy and control over one's personal situation, and decline in self-esteem and self-image. These fears acted as incentives for developing various practical coping mechanisms for their daily lives, including measures that involved taking risks with regard to their physical safety. Using our existential anthropology approach, supported by the EI methodology, we closely examined the details of interviewees' realities.

Phenomenological Support for Escape Theory: A Qualitative Study Using Explicitation Interviews with Emotional Eaters

“…Each interview lasted for approximately one hour. Each of the eight participants was interviewed twice (one week apart), resulting in approximately 16 hours of interview data, which is comparable to the sample size of other studies that have used the method of EI (Bedin et al, 2019;Lechasseur et al, 2011). Two interviews were conducted for the following reasons: a) to allow for the adaptation and personalization of questions asked in the second interview to more deeply explore the speci c participant's phenomenology of emotional eating, b) to allow participants to learn how to successfully engage in an explicitation interview to increase the ease with which they can access their phenomenology of emotional eating in the second interview, c) to validate the within-participants ndings from the rst interview, and d) to examine whether and how the self-re ection encouraged in the rst interview in uenced the participants' emotional eating.…”

Phenomenological support for escape theory: a qualitative study using explicitation interviews with emotional eaters

“…Each interview lasted for approximately one hour. Each of the eight participants was interviewed twice (one week apart), resulting in approximately 16 h of interview data, which is comparable to the sample size of other studies that have used the method of EI [ 3 , 36 ]. Two interviews were conducted for the following reasons: a) to allow for the adaptation and personalization of questions asked in the second interview to more deeply explore the specific participant’s phenomenology of emotional eating, b) to allow participants to learn how to successfully engage in an explicitation interview to increase the ease with which they can access their phenomenology of emotional eating in the second interview, c) to validate the within-participants findings from the first interview, and d) to examine whether and how the self-reflection encouraged in the first interview influenced the participants’ emotional eating.…”

Loneliness Among the Elderly in Rural Contexts: A Mixed-Method Study Protocol

“…The analysis of empirical materials will be based on Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2017;Strauss & Corbin, 1997). The categories included in the semi-structured interview guide, based on research conducted on similar contexts and population samples (Bedin et al, 2019;Conkova et al, 2018;Morgan et al, 2020), will also guide the initial analysis once the interviews have been transcribed.…”