Caring for a Child With an Obstetric Brachial Plexus Injury: A Metaphor Analysis

The purpose of this study was to examine the metaphors used by mothers to describe their experiences caring for their children with obstetric brachial plexus injuries.

A secondary qualitative data analysis was conducted from the primary data set of a phenomenological study of mothers' experiences caring for their children with obstetric brachial plexus injuries. The type of secondary qualitative data analysis approach used was analytic expansion. Metaphor Identification Procedure was used to analyze the corpus of 132 pages of typed transcription.

This metaphorical analysis yielded seven metaphors mothers used to describe their experiences caring for their children with obstetric brachial plexus injuries. These metaphors portrayed mothers' lives as involving a heavy weight, a maze, a juggling act, a simmering pot, a dagger to the heart, a rollercoaster, and a constant battle.

The seven metaphors helped women express what they could not completely capture using only medical jargon and provide valuable insight for clinicians. Using secondary qualitative data analysis to mine for any metaphors in a primary data set gives researchers another valuable and creative opportunity to discover new knowledge from the data they had previously collected.

Specific interventions can be developed to target each of these seven metaphors to help mothers in their daily care for their children with obstetric brachial plexus injuries.