| Making use of a multidisciplinary qualitative research design, incorporating biographical, phenomenological, ethnographic, and case study views, this study presents a rashomonic - multiperspectival view of collective caregiving, through the life experience and transformation of each of 6 members of an all-gay-male, nonwaged, caregiving collective who together provided in-home care for a friend with AIDS, from diagnosis through death. Each of the 6 participants, selected through snowball sampling, participated in two separate research phases. In Phase I, 3 hrs in length, participants co-constructed, with the interviewer, a three-generation genogram, intended to reveal, through a 3-hr unstructured conversational interview, important aspects of the participant's life, particularly those related to illness, caregiving, and personal values. Each participant also shared an artifact chosen to symbolize himself as a person. In Phase II, 2 to 4 hr in length, each participant engaged in an unstructured conversational interview, focused on his sense and experience of serving as an in-home caregiver for a friend with AIDS. Again, each participant shared an artifact, this time symbolizing the person he provided care for and/or AIDS, and/or his personal essence as a caregiver. Detailed and richly crafted family of origin and extended family narratives of each phase I interview reveal evocative views of each research participant's place in his identified family constellation and gift the reader with an opportunity to see each participant as a unique individual whose path in life may provide insight into their time as a caregiver. Phase II narratives share, in personal and poignant detail, the individual views of each caregiver as he did his part in the collective caregiving effort, and speak to the way(s) in which caregiving transformed his life. Narratives and pictures of all artifacts are also presented to provide additional insight. Readers are invited to find their individual resonance with the narratives, such that they may gain an enhanced understanding the ongoing significance of AIDS in our world, the experience of providing in-home care for a person with AIDS or any other life-threatening illness, and the way our early family life prepares us to meet the challenges of living.;Keywords: AIDS, caregiving, family-of-origin, genogram, cohort-based care, nonwaged in-home care, HIV, multi-disciplinary, transformation, narrative. |
