Masters - Reflections on Learning

My reflections on the learning experience I have had through carrying out this dissertation revolves principally around the ability to collect data. I believe I initially underestimated the difficulty of sourcing potential interviewees who would agree to participate in the research process. I had naively assumed that a few phone-calls and/or emails to people and places I deemed relevant to the topic of pseudocyesis would see me find willing volunteers. This was not the case and I had to invest a lot of time and effort into locating nurses with the lived experience of treating patients who had suffered from pseudocyesis. This process was both frustrating and time-consuming and in hindsight I would have allocated more planned time to the recruitment of potential interviewees. I believe that I also underestimated the raw emotional feelings that nurses still expressed on the subject and whilst I had made provision for interviewees that expressed their emotions on the subject matter at hand, I had not in all honesty expected to encounter it. This leads me to conclude that the impact of pseudocyesis is an even deeper one than I originally imagined (i.e. patients and their families) and that the nurse’s level of empathy for their patients is evident and manifest when treating pseudocyesis. I also found that the gender of the interviewees reflected how they themselves approached the interviews. Female participants were initially more willing than the male participants to discuss their lived experience and feelings on the subject of pseudocyesis, whereas their male counterparts began by reporting the facts of what had occurred. Female participants also presented, in the recruitment phase, as being interested in my personal reasons for carrying out the research and seemed to respond with what I am terming ‘positive surprise’ to myself being a male researcher doing a study into pseudocyesis. I felt that the female participants had in a sense interviewed me on my lived experience of pseudocyesis, before I was able to interview them on their lived experience.