“Illness Narratives without the Illness: Biomedical HIV Prevention Narratives from East Africa”.26/6/2024 Johnson-Peretz J, Atwine F, Kamya M, et al. (2024). Journal of Medical Humanities. "Most of my friends are older than me; they guide me on how teenage life is. Therefore, one of them married a lady who was HIV-positive, but he did not know. Initially, they were using condoms until they went for the test and they found out that the lady was HIV-positive and he was HIV-negative. So the provider advised him to take PrEP then he enrolled to it. He is the one who told me how effective the drug is." (Quest genre, seeking advice. 19 y.o. male, Kenya) Synopsis: We present seven narratives concerned with biomedical illness prevention, gathered through semi-structured, in-depth interviews during a dynamic choice HIV prevention intervention study, thereby complicating the notion of an illness narrative by focusing on narratives about preventive care while connecting them to contextual African narrative genres.
Key Findings: Our participants deployed several identifiable patterns in their illness-prevention narratives, each of which relates to contemporary African narrative genres such as the trickster, the quest, and the tragic hero. The narratives describe social roles and relationships and how they influence people navigating prevention. Recommendations: Illness prevention narratives give public health researchers scripts which resonate with the moral and cultural sensibilities of a given population. With the introduction of HIV prevention options like PrEP, the uptake of cervical and anal cancer prevention through HPV vaccines, and the increased visibility of anti-vaccination groups, we argue it is time for public health officials to discuss the narratives and counter-narratives which concern not only risk but also the prevention and elimination of suffering and disease.
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Johnson-Peretz J, Arunga T, Lee J, et al. (2024). International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Cultural rigour (Lock et al., 2021) “affirms the value of experiential knowledge and stresses a collaborative process” (Leung et al., 2004). Synopsis: We describe a newly-developed, digital approach that integrates findings from our qualitative team, which we call R-EIGHT (Remote and Equitable Inductive Analysis for Global Health Teams), to speed the inductive coding process without sacrificing rigour, while remaining accessible to geographically dispersed teams. This is especially crucial in global health partnerships where on-the-ground researchers may have less input into codebook development compared to in-the-office researchers.
Method: The method consists of eight steps. (1) participant interviews are transcribed, during which time... (2) A team member develops an a priori codebook from existing interview guides and study protocols. (3) Each team member is given a transcript or set of transcripts for initial or line-by-line coding using the ‘comment’ function in MS Word. (4) The team members then send their coded or commented-upon transcripts to a central teammate responsible for merging the commented-upon documents. This will produce a document in which teammate comments for a given section all appear together in a side column. (5) The team meets to review the comments, which are conveniently grouped together around the relevant text, to foster discussion and compare the language each coder is using. (6) The team compares these inductively-derived codes with any a priori codes (if used) in axial or second-cycle coding to develop focused codes, in order to... (7) Define the range of application of an a priori code, and to add new parent and child codes to the codebook as necessary. (8) Finalise the codebook for coding the remaining data sets. Key Contribution: The technique we developed a) speeds the process of inductive coding as a team, b) visually displays interpretive consensus, and c) when appropriate fosters streamlined integration of inductive findings into codebooks. Because it involves all team members, our approach helps break the divide between in-office and on-the-ground teams, fostering integrated and representative contributions from all globally-dispersed team members. |
AuthorJason Johnson-Peretz is a medical anthropologist and qualitative research analyst for multinational projects in rural East Africa that, through person-centred models of care, aim to improve community health and end AIDS in the region. Archives
October 2025
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