Poster Presentation
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
9:00 AM - 9:45 AM
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
2:45 PM - 3:30 PM
The Experience of Women Managing Fecal Incontinence
Cynthia Peden-McAlpine, PhD, APRN, BC, School of Nursing, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, Donna Bliss, PhD, FAAN, University of Minnesota School of Nursing, Minneapolis, MN, USA, and Jamia Hill, RN, DC, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
| Learning Objective #1: Describe the experience of community dwelling women managing fecal incontinence. |
| Learning Objective #2: Discuss the implications of this phenomenological study on women with fecal incontinence for nursing practice. |
The purpose of this paper is to describe the lived experience of community dwelling women managing fecal incontinence. The specific aims of this study were twofold: 1. to understand the experience of women with fecal incontinence from the perspective of the women. 2. to elicit women's practical knowledge about self care and management strategies for fecal incontinence. Participants for this study were recruited from women who had participated in previous studies on FI. Ten of these women were randomly selected and sent a letter inviting them to participate in the study and all consented to participate. One audio-taped reflective interview of approximately 1.5 hours was conducted with each participant. The aim of the unstructured interview was to explore and gather experiential narrative material about FI. The central question asked of the participants was: what has your life experience of managing FI been like for you? Questions were asked only for the purpose of clarifying information. The audio-taped interviews were transcribed verbatim into a written text for analysis. A three-member research group conducted the analysis of the text by adapting Van Manen's (1990) phenomenological approach. The entire text was read a number of times to ascertain a general perspective of the whole. Merlau Ponty's lifeworld existentials of lived space, lived relationships, lived time and lived body were used as a focus for reading and interpreting the transcripts, question posing, reflecting and writing findings. The findings represent the common experiences of the women in each of the lifeworld existentials. Detailed descriptions of how the women experienced each domain are described and illustrated with examples from their narratives. One essential theme ‘controlling the body out of control' depicts the essence of the experience of fecal continence for these women. Implications for clinical practice will be discussed.