Abstract
Dissemination of findings in health sciences research can take many forms, but is usually through publication in peer-reviewed journals and oral and poster presentations at conferences and events. One of the challenges for the researcher is how to get the message across with maximum impact; poetry is one means of achieving this.
The reviewed paper fell into my inbox on the same week that I presented a seminar on the use of poetry to convey emotions in Masters and Doctoral work (Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR), 2015; MacDonald, 2015). This paper resonates strongly with this theme and has two purposes: to disseminate the research data in a way that is meaningful and exposes the participant voice, and to explore reflexivity and emotion in relation to the role of the researcher in qualitative research.
The researcher used a Critical Incident Methodology to explore the barriers and facilitators of the use of maternity services experienced by disabled women affected by domestic abuse. As tanka poetry contains both description (in this case of a critical incident experienced by the women) and emotion (their responses to this), this form of poetry appeared to be a good fit. Tanka poems date back to the 7th century and were used as a means of clandestine communication between lovers in the Japanese Imperial Court. They are structured of 31 syllables and five lines (5-7-5-7-7).
The author in this piece draws on Richardson’s (1994) work around found poetry which asks the researchers to consider three questions: Where am I in the poem? What do I know now that I didn’t before writing the poem? What poetic devices have been sacrificed in the writing of the poetry? These questions facilitated the researcher to think deeply about their role in the construction and presentation of their data and issues of power, empathy and reflexivity in sensitive topics are all addressed.
Art has long been identified as integral to nursing (Carper, 1978). As a researcher and educator, I view creative arts as a medium for nurse education that allows students to reflect, express emotions, increase understanding of concepts and support deep, transformational learning (Price, 2007). Dissemination of research in art forms such as tanka poetry can enhance empathic understanding, which may support sensitivity in caring (Galvin and Todres, 2011) and offers a more holistic understanding of the interpretation of findings than ‘mere summative descriptions’ (p.29).
Critiques of this form of dissemination argue that tight structures may remove or detract from important contextual features of the research. Thus, an important feature of trustworthiness of the data may require respondent validation of the crafted poems. This issue could be addressed by the author’s suggestion of the co-construction of poems, whereby the participants and the researcher write together, which adds a relational aspect to the data that is compatible with the principles of participatory research.
In the days before I discovered poetry, I reflected at my seminar this week that I had discarded 16 slides of results and data and replaced these with one poem. Poetry appeals to the affective response and transforms the listener to new streams of consciousness. Less is definitely more.