‘They think we’re just in God’s waiting room’: A discursive study on identity aloneness in stroke survivors

Lewis Jefferson, Stephen Dunne*

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

This paper examines the rhetorical strategies used by stroke survivors to attend to identity aloneness, a phenomenon in which individuals experience a sense of disconnect from others as a consequence of identity change, for which stroke is known as an antecedent. Three stroke survivors, and their spouses, were interviewed about their stroke, social support, and experiences with loneliness and identity change. The data was transcribed using a simplified version of the Jeffersonian method and analysed using a critical discursive psychological approach. This made it possible to examine the way in which the psychological business of identity aloneness was managed in participants’ talk via discursive devices such as metaphors and category entitlement, while also leaving room to consider how broader societal discourses were drawn upon. The analysis revealed two critical ways in which participants attended to the issue of identity aloneness: 1) by crafting and occupying a position of resilience; 2) by managing the impact of the post-stroke social world on their identities. These findings offer insight into how the issue of identity aloneness is made sense of by stroke survivors in the context of a discussion with an interviewer. Finally, findings informed future directions for research, including developing a comprehensive theory of identity aloneness using a grounded theory approach and developing and validating a psychometric measure of identity aloneness to be applied in a rehabilitative setting.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-19
Number of pages19
JournalHealth: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine
Early online date19 Sept 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 19 Sept 2024

Keywords

  • ageing and lifecourse
  • discourse analysis
  • discourse and conversation analysis
  • health
  • quality of life
  • social inequalities in health

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