Three doors to the house of perspective-taking and self-reflection : Experiences of guided narrator exploration for healthcare education

Abstract

Prior research shows that writing interventions can foster perspective-taking, the ability to imagine how other people would experience things. An aspect that is not well understood concerns the experienced effects of such writing for healthcare practitioners. How do clinicians experience the relevance and effects of personal reflective/creative writing from different points of view for their clinical practice? To investigate clinicians’ experienced effects of personal writing on perspective-taking and ethical patient-centered practice, we administered weekly writing interventions to healthcare and social work professionals over a 7-week course that followed the narrative medicine model. We guided participants to explore three narrator choices in their personal writing: The autobiographical first person; the autobiographical third person; and the fictional first person (i.e., a patient’s/client’s POV). Interviews with course participants (n = 14), analyzed using inductive reflexive thematic analysis, generated three themes reflecting experienced effects of personal writing from different points of view: (1) The familiar seen in a new light, the experience that the writing helped participants to see their clinical work and their own role with new acuity; (2) Transformations of emotions and relationships through the reframing and reinterpretation of experienced events, experienced changes in perspective and reoriented interpretations of clinical encounters and relationships; and (3) Questioning the objectivity of one’s observations and assumptions, questions related to epistemic humility inspired by the writing. The results illustrate the experienced relevance of personal reflective/creative writing for healthcare practitioners and show that narrator choice is relevant for the experienced effects.