Interviewing as therapy: researching parents' experiences of their child's life-threatening illness requiring ECMO

This retrospective study explores the views of eight parents' experience of their child's critical illness requiring extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) as to whether the same research investigation might be carried out contemporaneously It is acknowledged that a viewpoint elicited retrospectively may be altered by time and, therefore, in advance of any such prospective study being carried out, ethical concerns regarding the gathering of data at such a traumatic time must be given consideration In addition to material collected for the primary study, further data were gathered in order to elicit how the research process itself was defined and experienced by the parent participants Views were elicited through an informal debriefing interview immediately following the primary research interview and a follow-up, evaluative, postal questionnaire distributed one week later.