Experiencia y construcción de significados en relación con su rol en cuidadores de personas con esquizofrenia

Abstract

The perspective of situated knowledge; is an epistemological position that arises from the feminist movement and provides insight into the experiences and construction of meanings of a subject from the position within a specific context. This perspective is not intended to create generalizable knowledge. It rather seeks to understand a particular way of living reality that people face during specific problems. Taking that into account, the aim of this study is to understand the meaning that represents for an informal caregiver the act of taking care of a person with schizophrenia, by using the situated knowledge perspective as a theoretical reference. The methodology used in this work was the phenomenological method, that was essentially used to carry out five in-depth interviews to five informal caregivers of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, in order to explore about their experiences of being caregivers, the circumstances that lead them into being caregivers, the conditions under which care is given, the perceptions of the own caregiver’s health and their expectation. The information was recorded by audio and writing. The information analysis is done manually considering the authors Bautista (2011), Giraldo and González (2015) and Fernández (2006), initially guiding categories that were based from the theory and subsequently it was generated a series of emerging categories. After that both types of categories (theoretical and empirical) were contrasted to think about experience and meaning construction of caregivers of people with schizophrenia. Caregivers experience is framed in relation to the female gender which has traditionally assumed this function, and it is also a characteristic that ends justifying the identified assumed role.