Workshops of Sensitivity, Expressiveness and Creativity: A Path to Integrate Subjectivity and Reflection in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Nursing is a privileged space for expression of creative emotions, intuition and sensibility in private and subjective matters which may constitute the basis for the construction of research problems and for the process of generation of data in a qualitative investigation. The authors describe the production of a doctoral dissertation that used ethnographic methodology. The data were collected through workshops of sensibility, creativity and expressivity, which represent a space for reflection and action, in which the search is to explicate the reality where theory and practice merge. They are also a space of collective construction of knowledge with transforming power, capable of articulating the body of the participants as producer of subject and source in the research process. This tool reduces the asymmetry between researched and researchers and is in accordance with the presuppositions of ethnographic method once it makes it possible to learn and to experience with subjects studied, specially when they are nurses dealing with the same language and symbolic system, permitting the expression of subjectivity of both and their insertion in the research process. It also represents an alternative epistemological model, able to reveal the continuous interaction of the way of understanding the world and the way of being in this world as subject. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0302423