Exploring the felt sense of chronic ill-health: dialoguing between IPA, lifeworld theory and narrative inquiry to make sense of feelings and affect

We present a pluralist approach to analysing emotion and affect within subjective lived experience. We illustrate this by re-engaging with data about living with Parkinson’s disease (PD) to more fully understand the felt sense of chronic ill health. Following Pierce, we engage in abductive reasoning to achieve this. The original data were generated using semi-structured interviews and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. This inductive, idiographic analysis was our starting point. We then engaged in a dialogue between theory and data to further explicate the felt sense. Using the phenomenological theory of lifeworld revealed the presence and significance of emotion throughout and revealed the co-existence of well-being and suffering within the felt sense of PD. A narrative-oriented inquiry examined in detail the narrative structure within the retelling of the diagnosis and coming to terms with PD. Emotion was embedded in the account and revealed the prevailing mood within the experience.