Research
My research proposal has finally been approved by the institutional review board at the university. If you are three or more years from surgery and would like to participate in an interview, you can pm me. What I am looking at is the quality of life prior to WLS and quality of life following WLS. As most of you know, there is a lot of research about what leads up to surgery, but very little to nothing appears in the literature about what to expect after surgery. What kind of changes it makes in your life. So I am looking at those people who are both successful and those that have not been successful. The last category is pretty hard to find. They seem to be very silent. There is no financial reward for being a participant, you will just be giving up your time for about 2 hours. Your identity will be not be disclosed to anyone other than myself, and I will be the one doing the interview. I will mail back a transcript of our interview for you to review and make changes if you wish after the interveiw. It is all very appropriate research.
The way it works is that I call you and ask you 8 questions about your experiences before and after WLS. The interview is recorded on a tape...but I will tell you this and send you permission slips and everything. Then my graduate assistant, who does not know anything other than the sound of your voice and the number that I will give you, will transcribe the tape into typed pages. I will mail those to you and you can mark thorough what you don't want included...it could be too personal.....and you can add clarification, if you want. Then I will analyze all the transcripts together and get a series of categories that show trends in the experiences. They are the themes that emerge.
I will use quotes from some of your tapes, but you will be given a false name and there will be no identifying information. It might look like this (This is totally made up to illustrate how these things are reported.):
Mary, a 9 year post op, stated: "I'm glad I did this. My overall health is better. I finally got the job I wanted, because now I fit in the office chair in the front office." Mary's experience was different from Tamara's experience. In Tamara's own words, "I never knew how unhappy I was until the surgery. I always blamed my weight, and now there is not one to blame. I hate that I did this." Tamara was 3 years post WLS. The theme that emerged was that the further away from surgery, ......"
This is just an example so you can see how it might look. I don't think that any of you would know who Mary or Tamara were if you met them on the street, as that will not be part of the article. Hopefully, the whole thing can be published in a national journal for counselors and other mental health specialists.
I have no idea what the themes that may emerge from all of this are. I think there are some myths out there that are not investigated and people are providing services without any kind of research going on...that is why I am doing this. If you check the internet you will see all these myths, but if you look at them for a while, you will see that they are not research based...they are just some therapist's nonscientific observation...not a broad spectrum of people who have had WLS.
