While thoughtful engagement with communities of practice should be a priority in all research, it is particularly relevant for the developing field of Contemplative Studies and the health care field where the main object of study is a person's (embodied) experience. This capstone project involved participant’s qualitative interviews in a study on the effects of qigong, a Chinese energy movement practice, on cancer-related fatigue. The goal of the capstone was to highlight the importance of participant experience in health research, particularly with respect to disorders like cancer-related fatigue: the most common adverse effect of cancer treatment, which has no known bio-medical mechanism, no definitive treatment, and is often not well-respected or responded to by physicians. This project prioritized participant experiences, allowing them to guide an explanation of how the practice could help improve their symptoms, while also creating a pathway by which future researchers could use participant experience to help guide study in research areas that are not well defined by or understood under classical bio-medical frameworks. Beyond the research itself, this engaged project included other components outside, such as increasing channels of support and communication with past study participants, and doing a write up of best practices for doing engaged research in the developing field of contemplative studies.
Notes:
The Engaged Scholars Program--Brown University, 2019
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Citation
Sandweiss, Sophie,
"Trauma, Embodiment, and Healing: A Qualitative Study on Qigong for Cancer-Related Fatigue"
(2019).
Engaged Scholars Capstones.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/cgkz-d846
