Project Details
Projekt
Untimely heart disease. Time structures of good life in psychocardiology
Applicant
Professor Dr. Christoph Herrmann-Lingen
Subject Area
Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
Practical Philosophy
Practical Philosophy
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424883170
The subproject examines changes in the perception and design of a good life for persons affected by premature and thus subjectively often "untimely" heart disease. The project will investigate, on and with these persons and a group of close relatives, (i) how heart disease influences the experience and organization of time (for example aspects of time sovereignty, intergenerational relationships and the view of the past, present and future), (ii) whether and how the altered experience of time contributes to the increased incidence of psychosocial problems and mental disorders typically observed in these persons, (iii) whether in turn the experience of time is influenced by those psychosocial problems, and (iv) how the quality of life of those affected, which is increasingly accepted as a central goal of medical therapy, can be understood as a holistic concept of good life, placed in a time perspective. For this purpose, after an interdisciplinary refinement of the underlying terms and concepts, a cross-sectional, predominantly qualitative empirical study will be designed and carried out. By means of interviews based on phenomenological psychopathology and operationalised psychodynamic diagnostics, among other approaches, the study will provide a multidi-mensional picture of ideas of good life in time for these persons, show deficits of established instruments for measuring quality of life in medicine as well as insufficiently covered support and treatment needs of affected persons and outline perspectives for the further development of quality oif life assessment tools and targeted interventions. In the first phase, dedicated to the theoretical foundation, the subproject will closely coordinate with SP 1 (Philosophy), to which it will subsequently provide empirical material to test its theoretical assumptions. The targeted consideration of gender effects, for example in the area of family planning of young women and men with heart disease, will provide links to the focus on reproductive medicine in SP 4 (Sociology / social psychology) and SP 5 (Ethics of reproductive medicine). The video interviews with their scenic material and narratives will be evaluated in cooperation with SP 2 (Film / television). Video interviews will also be analyzed by text analytic methods, harnessing the methodological competence available in SP 4 (Sociology / social psychology) and SP 6 (General practice). The perception of premature old age by people suffering from heart disease in young or middle age, which is expected from clinical observations, raises questions that can be addressed with the help of the conceptual tools of SP 7 (Ethics of geriatric medicine) and in comparison with the empirical findings of SP 6 (General practice).
DFG Programme
Research Units
