Theories and studying the care of dying people

This is the last in a series of six articles on the importance of theories and values in health research The quality of care for dying people is often investigated by interviews with dying people, or with carers before or after the death. Conventionally the respondent's account is treated as a resource for learning about previous events. Analysis is concerned with veracity, bias, and the validity of such data. This article describes a project in which the initial analysis of interviews took this approach. Subsequently, the analysis shifted towards a view of the interview as a topic, primarily concerned with events during the interview. This article also shows how theories of language and self identity led the researchers to a questioning of accepted views about the needs of dying people and their carers. #### Summary points The study concerned events in the final year of life of a nationally representative sample of 639 adults who died in 1987. 1 2 Surviving relatives and others who knew the people who died were interviewed to discover their perceptions of the quality of health care. To investigate bias, relatives' accounts were compared with those of healthcare staff about the symptoms of the people who died, the number of admissions to hospital, the incidence of various procedures, the effectiveness of pain …