Understanding the Childhood Asthma Experience

The contents of this poster are based on transcripts from five in-depth interviews and a one-panel discussion of community health workers conducted as part of a 2015 asthma study led by Professor Kim Erwin at the Institute of Design, Chicago. My process was based on Strauss and Corbin’s (1967) version of the Grounded Theory approach; I used Delve for Qualitative Data Analysis.

Through the analysis and synthesis process, I found that mothers caring for asthmatic children may benefit from awareness about triggers, addressing of bureaucratic barriers, stronger trust with providers, and overall asthma education. This poster depicts relationships driving these opportunities identified through qualitative research synthesis­­ and proposes design directions for development and testing.

The conceptual diagram in the poster connects categories emergent from the process, starting with the six transcripts. The diagram follows a left-to-right flow­­, with arrows for clarity from causes and phenomena, through strategies, to consequences—based roughly on the sequence of events described by participants during interviews from discovering asthma to learning to cope to living with it.