Living with diabetes—Development of learning patterns over a 3-year period

Abstract

BackgroundLearning involves acquiring new knowledge and skills, and changing our ways of thinking, acting, and feeling. Learning in relation to living with diabetes is a lifelong process where there is limited knowledge of how it is experienced and established over time. It was considered important to explore how learning was developed over time for persons living with diabetes.AimThe aim of the study was to identify patterns in learning when living with diabetes, from recently being diagnosed, and over a 3-year period.Materials and methodsA longitudinal qualitative descriptive design was used. Thirteen participants, with both type I and type II diabetes, were interviewed at three different occasions during a 3-year period. Qualitative content analysis was used in different steps in order to distinguish patterns.FindingsFive main patterns of learning were identified. Two of the patterns (I and II) were characterized by gradually becoming comfortable living with diabetes, whereas for one pattern (IV) living with diabetes became gradually more difficult. For pattern V living with diabetes was making only a limited impact on life, whereas for Pattern III there was a constant management of obstacles related to illness. The different patterns in the present study showed common and different ways of learning and using different learning strategies at different timespans.ConclusionThe present study showed that duration of illness is not of importance for how far a person has come in his own learning process. A person-centered care is needed to meet the different and changing needs of persons living with diabetes in relation to learning to live with a lifelong illness.

Analyzing variations in changes over time: development of the Pattern‐Oriented Longitudinal Analysis approach

“…Research can emphasize various types of change, for example, individual, social, environmental (c.f McCoy, ), and either what, how or why changes occur or are absent (Saldaña, ). For example, in Kneck, Fagerberg, Eriksson, and Lundman (), the focus of change was on how people learned on an individual level.…”

“…Such an example is presented in Kneck et al. (), where a few broad open‐ended questions were posed at all interviews. The initial question was ‘How do you experience living with diabetes?’ This question was followed by participants being asked to narrate situations where they had to take their diabetes into account, focusing on what they did, thought and felt.…”

“…Here, an established analysis method can be of use for organizing the data. In our work and in the articles we scrutinized, four different analysis methods were used for this or equivalent stages: the constant comparative method (Cooper et al., ; Johansen et al., ), thematic analysis (Kinnafick et al., ), qualitative content analysis (Kneck et al., ), and interpretive description (Audulv, ; Audulv et al., ).…”

“…Schematic illustration of the development of one individual pattern (Kneck et al., . Living with diabetes—development of learning patterns over a 3‐year period.…”

Experiences of specially trained personnel of group education for patients with type 2 diabetes—A lifeworld approach

“…The turning point occurs when the illness is experienced as more severe and may affect the self‐management and make the patient more engaged in the learning process (Jutterström, Isaksson, Sandström, & Hörnsten, ). The duration of illness is not of importance for the patient's learning process, which emphasizes a person‐centred care to meet the different and changing needs when living with lifelong illness such as T2D (Kneck, Fagerberg, Eriksson, & Lundman, ).…”