Using the Transformative Storytelling Technique to Generate Empowering Narratives for Informal Caregivers: Semistructured Interviews, Thematic Analysis, and Method Demonstration

Abstract

Background The transformative storytelling technique is an innovative top-down approach to narrative therapy that aims to provide building blocks for creating flourishing narratives for target groups or populations. This approach acts as a facilitator for implementing the human-centered design in developing digital self-help tools for larger samples or target groups. Objective This study applied the transformative storytelling technique, as a new approach in mental health, to develop empowering audio narratives for informal caregivers. Methods A narrative inquiry was conducted with 17 informal caregivers (16 women and 1 man) who completed a semistructured interview, “Caregiver Life Story,” acquiring information about the beginning of the role, rising action, and critical point of the role. The participants’ ages ranged from 41 to 84 years, with all participants providing care for at least a 6-month period. This inquiry was guided by the transformative storytelling technique, and aimed to collect data relevant to creating fictional stories based on real-life themes. Results Twenty-five overall themes were distinguished across three a priori–set categories, providing narrative building blocks for the informal caregiver life stories. The final empowering caregiver life story was created as an example for this study, demonstrating the application of the transformative storytelling technique in an informal care context. Conclusions The creation of empowering stories for populations or target groups in mental health care requires a unified and guided approach that will follow clear guidelines and storytelling principles. The transformative storytelling technique is a first of its kind in the mental health context, representing an initial step in enabling and supporting the creation of meaningful stories and the development of relatable, but productive, narratives. Such narratives have the potential to serve across media and digital platforms for supporting and improving well-being, and potentially triggering self-change in the target group or population.

Beyond influence: Contextualization and optimization for new narrative techniques and story-formats. Perspective paper

“…Carragher et al (2021) used storytelling as a therapeutic approach for individuals living with aphasia and demonstrated an additional role of storytelling in improving aspects of language and communication. Similarly, the authors of this paper (Petrovic et al, 2022) demonstrated the application of storytelling on a sample of informal caregivers. Moreover, in a large-scale digital project exploring the role of storytelling in formal education, storytelling also showed excellent results in supporting the knowledge acquisition in a sample of over 17.000 students, as well as in media literacy, and improvement in attitudes and behaviors of the students (Blas and Paolini, 2013).…”

“…Informal caregivers are family members or close others who provide long-term care for a loved one in need, with no financial benefit. After exploring the existing digital solutions for informal caregivers (Petrovic and Gaggioli, 2020) and reflecting on how these solutions are used in the caregiving context, we noted a gap in the existing tools for supporting and facilitating the shift into the caregiving role and understanding personal and care related needs throughout the role (Petrovic et al, 2022).…”

“…However, no existing mental health digital storytelling technique for guiding and designing group and target population support was discovered. Therefore, we developed the Transformative Storytelling Technique (Petrovic and Gaggioli, 2021;Petrovic et al, 2022) that can be adapted to both audio and video formats and is applicable to large populations or target groups.…”

“…Practically, the technique is implemented by collecting structured interview data, analyzing the collected corpus to form clusters of narrative sub-themes (i.e., target group needs throughout different points in the story) and feeding the themes into the Freytag pyramid (Freytag, 1894) (i.e., the beginning, rising action, climax, etc.) to form a story (see Petrovic et al, 2022). The optimized thematic sequencing provides a model for how to capture-and share-highly personal accounts of the often lonely and unsupported work of caring for others in a domestic setting to a wider population belonging to the same target group (Figure 1).…”

“…In fact, narratives were shown to engage the audience in qualitatively deeper ways than other forms of messages (Grall et al, 2021). This perspective paper reflects on the utilization of the recently developed Transformative Storytelling Technique (Petrovic and Gaggioli, 2021;Petrovic et al, 2022) for structuring and optimizing empowering narratives to deliver prosocial and health stories. We developed the Transformative Storytelling Technique (TST) as a hybrid method for merging fictional structure and real-life accounts to guide the audiences' experience and provide support for the often solitary and exposed role of informal caregivers caring for spouses, relatives, and friends.…”