Brief narrative interventions for adults with chronic illness or psychosocial distress: a scoping review protocol

Narrative interventions elicit personal stories from participants to impact outcome(s). The process of organising a troublesome experience into a cohesive story may benefit individuals dealing with a variety of complex medical conditions and psychosocial stressors. A better understanding of prior work is a critical step to guide further development, refinement and expansion of this under-recognised therapeutic modality for new populations.

This scoping review will follow recommendations of the Joanna Briggs Institute and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews to map and summarise the content and context of brief narrative interventions intended for individuals with chronic illness and/or psychosocial distress. Inclusion criteria are records describing brief (≤4 discrete session) interventions eliciting personal stories with the intent of impacting patient-centred outcomes (eg, depression, quality of life) delivered in any context. Participants will be adults (≥18 years old) living with chronic medical or psychiatric conditions (eg, metastatic cancer, chronic pain) or psychosocial distress (eg, grief, loneliness). Studies whose focus is not direct participant benefit or studies conducted in populations without evident illness or psychosocial stressors will be excluded. An initial search of PubMed (MEDLINE) identified sentinel articles; a comprehensive strategy was developed with the assistance of a librarian for systematically searching PubMed (MEDLINE), PsycInfo (EBSCOhost), CINAHL (EBSCOhost) and Embase (Ovid). Bibliographies of relevant articles will also be examined. Two independent reviewers will screen articles; disagreements will be discussed at regular meetings. U-M GPT, an artificial intelligence-powered institutional large language model, will perform initial data abstraction with a human reviewer verifying accuracy. Findings will be qualitatively summarised according to the three research questions, presented in tabular format, and described narratively.

As data will be obtained only from secondary sources, no ethics approval will be sought. Findings will be disseminated via the scoping review Open Science Framework (OSF) project site and submitted for peer review. Results will elucidate promising areas for future research, including narrative intervention development and refinement; these findings will guide expansion into new populations.

https://osf.io/85hjd/.