When Family Don’t Acknowledge: A Hermeneutic Study of the Experience of Kinship Stigma in Community-Dwelling People With Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that kinship stigma—the experience of being or feeling stigmatized by family members—arises in the stories of people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Adopting Goffman’s definition of stigma as “an attribute which is deeply discrediting,” we used hermeneutic (interpretive) phenomenology to further explore the meaning of kinship stigma for people with IBD and reveal its significance. In total, 18 unstructured interviews took place in participants’ own homes in the United Kingdom, between July 2015 and April 2016. Transcripts were analyzed using a hermeneutic method to reveal three relational themes and one constitutive pattern. Referring to relevant literature, the presence and impact of kinship stigma on people with IBD is revealed. Kinship stigma—experienced as and meaning a lack of acknowledgment—may have wide-ranging implications for health and social care professionals caring for persons with IBD or other chronic illness and their families.