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Event-related Potentials During Target-response Tasks to Study Cognitive Processes of Upper Limb Use in Children with Unilateral Cerebral Palsy
Published on: January 11, 2016
The lived body - experiences from adults with cerebral palsy
1Department of Health and Society/Physiotherapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, Linköping University, Sweden. karsa@ihs.liu.se
Objective:
To get a deeper understanding into how adults with cerebral palsy experience living with a disability and how they manage daily life.
Design:
Interviews with open-ended questions were carried out. They were analysed by one person according to the Empirical Phenomenological Psychological method (EPP). Setting and subjects : Twenty-two community-living adults (35-68 years) with cerebral palsy from five counties in Sweden participated. All had mobility problems and all had cognitive abilities making it possible to carry on a conversation.
Results:
The varied experiences resulted in themes including (1) perceptions of living with a disability and (2) strategies used for managing the described perceptions. The perceptions were: a dys-appearing body, a not-appearing body, difference, being in-between, normality, restricted autonomy and autonomy. The strategies were: to fight one's way, to plan, to get used to it, to hide and to give one's all.
Conclusion:
These interviews expressed heterogeneity in lived experiences showing the importance for professionals to meet people with cerebral palsy as individual subjects in relation to functional problems, self-image and autonomy together with seeing the consequences of different coping strategies.
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