Storytelling in diabetes: a mixed-methods study

Professor Trish Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences is delivering a talk as part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care and for the Mixed Methods in Health Research course. Storytelling in diabetes: a mixed-methods study The literature on behaviour change‚‚ is as depressing as it is conflicting. Especially when applied to people with low health literacy from low-income backgrounds, that literature is theory-heavy but results-light. In short, complex interventions‚‚ aimed at changing behaviour‚‚ rarely produce significant patient-relevant outcomes in people outside the motivated and health-literate middle classes. This programme of work built on an early finding that one thing that does seem to change behaviour in British Bangladeshis is a story told by another Bangladeshi ‚ and a later finding that sharing stories was a pretty good way of changing behaviour in other cultures too. But researching the sharing of informal stories in the deprived communities of London’s East End raised practical, ethical and methodological challenges. The ‘sharing Stories‚‚ programme has run for 20 years and included ethnography, interviews, a randomised trial, process evaluation and action research. It’s probably broken every rule of mixed-method research at some stage. But the story of how it all unfolded and the benefits it’s brought to one of the UK’s most deprived communities is worth telling. This talk is free and there is no need to book a place.