CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Cardillo, L. W. (1999). Sense-Making as theory and method for researching lived experience: An exemplar in the context of health communication and adolescent illness. The Electronic Journal of Communication [On-line serial] 9 (2, 3, & 4).
© The Electronic Journal of Communication (1999).

ABSTRACT:
This essay explores the possibilities offered by Sense-Making Methodology as an exceptionally useful theory and method for studying lived experience. Following an overview and explanation of the theory and method, the use of Sense-Making is demonstrated through the description of a case study of health communication in the context of adolescents dealing with chronic health conditions. In theory and practice, Sense-Making Methodology provides a satisfying response to challenges posed to qualitative researchers by postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist critiques, including questions about the ethics of representation, interpretation, the role and voice of the “Other” in research, and the ways that research practices too often serve to further objectify and dominate those who are already systematically disempowered in society. Chronically ill adolescents are an example of a population for whom issues of power, control, autonomy, and representation have particular salience, with implications for research methodology and methods and for everyday communication interactions, including communication in health care settings. Sense-Making is particularly useful in such contexts because it provides both a way of conceptualizing lived experience and a way of dialoguing about it, and because it explicitly mandates and enacts the privileging of the voice of the Other as theorist of his or her own life.

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