Glue that sticks and separates

Glue ear (Otitis Media) is a common condition which approximately 80% of children under the age of 8 years will experience (Bluestone 2002). Most of the research into the condition has focused on the identification of medical causes and treatment. It is a continuum condition, some young people having one or two episodes while others continue to experience it into adulthood. It results in intermittent deafness. Often the child will pass a number of hearing tests as the condition is intermittent. However little is known about the lived experience of those young people, and their parents who have the condition in the longer term. Using a combination of Photovoice and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) my research asks parents and young people to reflect and discuss what it is like to have the condition. The Photovoice methodology (Wang 1997) is based on the idea that people are the experts in their own situation, which can sometimes lead to difficulties in relationships with policy makers who believe differently. It is usually used in community settings to identify the health issues of most importance to the participants who take and select their own photographs to prioritise these issues. I combined this technique with IPA (Smith 2009) as I was working with individuals rather than groups and wanted to access their emotions about how they felt having a child with Glue Ear had impacted any area of their life which they considered significant. In my analysis of the comments they make, I am making links to the findings of mainly quantitative studies on the longer term impact of the condition as a way of giving depth from the human experience to the findings of large scale studies which look at overall findings. The initial findings from parents, mainly mothers, suggest that their emotions are central to dealing with a child with a condition that is not seen as either life-threatening or serious in the longer term. Despite reassurances from medical professionals that the glue ear is likely to resolve itself by the time their child is about 7 years of age, parents of younger children worry about the impact on speech and social skills. The relationships with medical professionals, initially GPs and Health Visitors, is described by the mothers as being that they are seen as overly anxious with the ‘problem’ being theirs not the child’s. When the child starts school the relationships with educational professionals appear to follow a similar experience of their child’s hearing issues being trivialised. Parents say they want to work in partnership with medical professionals and school staff, hoping that they will provide guidance and expertise in the condition, but often decide they know more than the ‘experts’ (Wuest 1990). Participants from my research describe their emotional responses and the way that relationships have been impacted