Sally Thorne
Biographic Data
| ID | 74974 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sally Thorne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sally |
| FAMILY NAME | Thorne |
| SIGNATURE | THORNE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1156-9425 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 390 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1941 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
‘There are so many good things outside, let me tell you’
Outdoor play in early childhood supports physical, emotional, cognitive and social development. Early learning and child care (ELCC) environments offer important opportunities for outdoor play not otherwise experienced in a home or community setting. This study aims to understand children’s perspectives of outdoor play affordances at two ELCC centres in the Greater Vancouver region of British Columbia, Canada, participating in the PROmoting Early…
What Factors Influence Canadian Nurse Practitioners’ Willingness to Act as Assessors and Providers for Medical Assistance in Dying (Maid)
In passing legislation in 2016 to allow medical assistance in dying (MAID), Canada became the world's first jurisdiction to allow nurse practitioners (NPs) to act as MAID assessors and providers. Health Canada's annual report shows that the demand for MAID in Canada increases each year, as does the proportion of MAID cases that NPs provide. The purpose of this study was to better understand factors that motivate or deter nurse practitioners from …
The Evolving Complexities of Maid Care in Canada From a Nursing Perspective
Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) legislation has evolved rapidly in Canada with significant impacts on nursing practice. The purpose of this paper is to describe evolving complexities in legislative context and practice standards that influence the experiences nurse practitioners and registered nurses have with MAID. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 25 registered nurses and 10 nurse practitioners from diverse contexts across Canada. P…
Cervical Cancer Screening Uptake and Experiences of Black African Immigrant Women in Canada
Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death among African women. Unfortunately, in most sub-Saharan African nations, women are vulnerable if they are unaware that cervical cancer is preventable with frequent screening and early treatment. The aim of this study was to examine Black African immigrant women's perceptions and experiences of cervical screening in British Columbia, Canada. Twenty Black African immigrant women w…
Health and healthcare equity within the Canadian cancer care sector
Health and healthcare equity is a growing priority in the cancer care sector; however, conceptual clarity is needed to guide the development of robust equity goals, and the development of sustainable, measurable actions that redress inequities across the cancer control continuum. If we are to advance health and healthcare equity in the cancer care sector, a coordinated and integrated approach will be required to enact transformative and meaningfu…
Exploring the Expansive Properties of Interpretive Description
There is an ever-present need to challenge, create, and expand upon qualitative research approaches in the applied and practice disciplines to avoid repeating mistakes of the past and to realize a research agenda for socially just practice. Toward these goals, anti-oppressive researchers engage with a variety of methodologies to co-produce accounts that reflect a comprehensive understanding of social problems with the people who experience them a…
Interpretive description
Barriers to Equity in Cancer Survivorship Care
As more cancer patients survive into post-treatment, the challenge of managing their survivorship care is confronting health care systems globally. In striving to deliver high quality survivorship care, equity constitutes a particularly troublesome challenge. We analyzed accounts from both cancer survivors and stakeholders within care system management to uncover insights with respect to barriers to equitable cancer survivorship services. Beyond …
Circumventing tobacco control and safety policies to promote waterpipe use in smoking venues
The study provides preliminary evidence indicating the ineffectiveness of current tobacco control policy on WPS. Due to its risks to health and safety, and the need to sustain tobacco control efforts for their intended purpose, waterpipe-specific regulations and stricter surveillance on waterpipe sales and promotion are urgently required
Applied Interpretive Approaches
In the applied world of the practice disciplines, the recognized limitations of conventional science have stimulated a lively and enthusiastic uptake of many of the qualitative research approaches generated over decades of social science scholarship. However, because of significant differences in the nature and motivation between the more theoretical and more applied fields, many applied scholars have been departing from established method to art…
Constructing Good Nursing Practice for Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada
Nurses play a central role in Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in Canada. However, we know little about nurses' experiences with this new end-of-life option. The purpose of this study was to explore how nurses construct good nursing practice in the context of MAiD. This was a qualitative interview study using Interpretive Description. Fifty-nine nurses participated in semi-structured telephone interviews. Data were analyzed inductively. The fin…
Arabian nights in Hong Kong
We provide the first evidence regarding Chinese young adults' WPS use. Policy measures to de-normalise false perceptions of WPS are urgently needed to deter use among young adults
On the Evolving World of What Constitutes Qualitative Synthesis
As the body of available qualitatively derived knowledge expands, there is increasing temptation to capitalize on it to generate knowledge synthesis products. Concurrently, in the wake of an ever-expanding enthusiasm for evidence-based practice knowledge in health care, scholars are facing pressure to forgo the more narrative or interpretive form of literature review in favor of reviews that are positioned as explicitly systematic. This has creat…
Time to challenge the spurious hierarchy of systematic over narrative reviews?
Cynthia Mulrow's important paper calling for literature reviews to be undertaken more systematically (and hence be more informative and reliable) is now 30 years old.1 A recent paper in BMC Medical Research Methodology compared the proportion of reviews that were systematic (as opposed to narrative) in five leading biomedical journals.2 The authors found significant diversity: from New England Journal of Medicine (0%) and Lancet (11%) to Annals o…
Interpretation and use of patient-reported outcome measures through a philosophical lens
Navigating the Dangerous Terrain of Moral Distress
Moral distress is a well-recognized and ubiquitous aspect of health care professional practice in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) context. We used interpretive description methodology to guide a critical exploration of the dynamics of moral distress experience as reflected in the accounts of 28 health care professionals working in this setting. We learned about the kinds of clinical scenarios which triggered distressing experiences, and t…
Advancing the Field of Synthesis Scholarship
Continuing the dialogue and debate on the relevance and value of qualitative metasynthesis research for the health fields, Thorne comments on some of the ideas raised by Britten and colleagues in response to her January 2017 Qualitative Health Research editorial on Metasynthetic Madness. Here she extends the debate on the terminology with which we refer to this kind of scholarly work and the kinds of research synthesis that hold potential for add…
Metasynthetic Madness
From its origins in the 1990s, the qualitative health research metasynthesis project represented a methodological maneuver to capitalize on a growing investment in qualitatively derived study reports to create an interactive dialogue among them that would surface expanded insights about complex human phenomena. However, newer forms positioning themselves as qualitative metasynthesis but representing a much more technical and theoretically superfi…
Interpretive Description
The first edition of Interpretive Description established itself as the key resource for novice and intermediate level researchers in applied settings for conducting a qualitative research project with practical outcomes. In the second edition, leading qualitative researcher Sally Thorne retains the clear, straightforward guidance for researchers and students in health, social service, mental health, and related fields. This new edition includes …
Interpretive Description
This book is designed to guide both new and more seasoned researchers through the steps of conceiving, designing, and implementing coherent research capable of generating new insights in clinical settings. Drawing from a variety of theoretical, methodological, and substantive strands, interpretive description provides a bridge between objective neutrality and abject theorizing, producing results that are academically credible, imaginative, and cl…
Interpretive Description
"The first edition of Interpretive Description established itself as the key resource for novice and intermediate level researchers in applied settings for conducting a qualitative research project with practical outcomes. In the second edition, leading qualitative researcher Sally Thorne retains the clear, straightforward guidance for researchers and students in health, social service, mental health, and related fields. This new edition includes…
It's a Sentence, Not a Word
Keyword analysis has been championed as a methodological option for expanding the insights that can be extracted from qualitative datasets using various properties available in qualitative software. Intrigued by the pioneering applications of Clive Seale and his colleagues in this regard, we conducted keyword analyses for word frequency and "keyness" on a qualitative database of interview transcripts from a study on cancer communication. We then …
Revisiting Symbolic Interactionism as a Theoretical Framework Beyond the Grounded Theory Tradition
The tight bond between grounded theory (GT) and symbolic interactionism (SI) is well known within the qualitative health research field. We aimed to disentangle this connection through critical reflection on the conditions under which it might add value as an underpinning to studies outside the GT tradition. Drawing on an examination of the central tenets of SI, we illustrate with a field study using interpretive description as methodology how SI…
Communication Challenges for Chronic Metastatic Cancer in an Era of Novel Therapeutics
Advances in the production of novel therapies for cancer management are creating new challenges for the support of increasing numbers of persons surviving for extended periods with advanced disease. Despite incurable and life-limiting metastatic conditions, these patients are living longer with serious disease, pushing the boundaries of what science explains and clinicians can confidently interpret using available evidence. Here we report finding…
Toward Methodological Emancipation in Applied Health Research
In this article, I trace the historical groundings of what have become methodological conventions in the use of qualitative approaches to answer questions arising from the applied health disciplines and advocate an alternative logic more strategically grounded in the epistemological orientations of the professional health disciplines. I argue for an increasing emphasis on the modification of conventional qualitative approaches to the particular k…
The Analytic Challenge in Interpretive Description
The past decade has witnessed remarkable evolution within qualitative health research as scholars have moved beyond initial adherence to the specific methods of phenomenology, grounded theory, and ethnography to develop methods more responsive to the experience-based questions of interest to a practice-based discipline. Interpretive description ( Thorne, Reimer Kirkham, & MacDonald-Emes, 1997 ) is an inductive analytic approaches designed to crea…
Influence of the Research Frame on Qualitatively Derived Health Science Knowledge
Although qualitative researchers generally acknowledge that their theoretical location and methodological orientation will influence the findings of their inquiries, it has been less well understood how the body of knowledge within a substantive field might be shaped by these factors. In this article, the authors draw on insights obtained from their experiences attempting to synthesize qualitative research findings. From that reflective process, …
Toward Methodological Emancipation in Applied Health Research
In this article, I trace the historical groundings of what have become methodological conventions in the use of qualitative approaches to answer questions arising from the applied health disciplines and advocate an alternative logic more strategically grounded in the epistemological orientations of the professional health disciplines. I argue for an increasing emphasis on the modification of conventional qualitative approaches to the particular k…
Metasynthetic Madness
From its origins in the 1990s, the qualitative health research metasynthesis project represented a methodological maneuver to capitalize on a growing investment in qualitatively derived study reports to create an interactive dialogue among them that would surface expanded insights about complex human phenomena. However, newer forms positioning themselves as qualitative metasynthesis but representing a much more technical and theoretically superfi…
Living with Diabetes as a Transformational Experience
The construct of transformation has been presented in many research studies as the epitome of living with a chronic illness. Because it has been inadequately defined, however, many other concepts (e.g., hope, meaning, control) are used in ways that suggest considerable overlap and correspondence with transformation. This article represents an attempt to explicate the structures and processes of transformation as they were revealed in a qualitativ…
The Structure of Everyday Self-Care Decision Making in Chronic Illness
As health care reform strategists increasingly recognize the critically important potential of effective everyday self-care decision making for reducing the burden of illness and the strain on health service systems, wemust find ways to understand and support it. In this study, the authors investigate persons with expertise in self-care management of type 2 diabetes,HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis to understand how everyday self-care decision ma…
Men, Masculinities, and Prostate Cancer
Patient-physician communication is vital in cancer care, and aspects of the patients' experiences provide insight into what constitutes effective cancer communication. Complexities inherent in prostate cancer regarding screening, treatment(s) efficacy, and side effects commonly form the basis of patient-physician discussions. However, the specificities of patient-physician communications, particularly in the male dyad, and the connections to masc…
Methodological Orthodoxy in Qualitative Nursing Research
In this analysis, the applicability of orthodox qualitative research traditions to the questions of nursing science is considered from a critical perspective. The theoretical traditions of ethnography, phenomenology, and grounded theory are examined in light of their relationship to the larger projects of anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. From that perspective, the questions inherent to nursing science are distinguished, revealing major de…
Revisiting Symbolic Interactionism as a Theoretical Framework Beyond the Grounded Theory Tradition
The tight bond between grounded theory (GT) and symbolic interactionism (SI) is well known within the qualitative health research field. We aimed to disentangle this connection through critical reflection on the conditions under which it might add value as an underpinning to studies outside the GT tradition. Drawing on an examination of the central tenets of SI, we illustrate with a field study using interpretive description as methodology how SI…
Exploiting Exceptions to Enhance Interpretive Qualitative Health Research
Although it has long been understood that a well-constructed data set ought to be filled with complexities and contradictions, observations that challenge or contradict analytic interpretations are not often given sufficiently serious attention in the methodological qualitative health literature. When researchers attempt to produce comprehensive or 'holistic' findings, they all too often set aside or gloss over the negative cases that fail to con…
Land Mines in the Field
In this commentary, the authors encourage a renewed enthusiasm for attention to quality criteria in qualitative health research by poking fun at what they understand to be patterns and themes emerging from data collected in their respective extensive 'fieldwork' experiences within the genre. Conceptualizing some of the particularly problematic interpretive turns as land mines in the field (or, alternatively, missteps in the dance, cracks in the p…
Patient Real-Time and 12-Month Retrospective Perceptions of Difficult Communications in the Cancer Diagnostic Period
Communication is a notoriously complex challenge in the cancer care context. Our program of research involves exploration of patient-provider communications across the cancer trajectory from the patient perspective.Toward this end, we have been following a cohort of 60 cancer patients, representing a range of tumor sites, from immediately after diagnosis through to recovery, chronic, or advanced disease. Drawing on interpretive description analyt…
Health Care Communication Issues in Multiple Sclerosis
Communication between persons with chronic illness and their professional health care providers is a critical element of appropriate health care. As the field of health care communication evolves, it becomes apparent that aspects of the illness experience shared by those affected by specific diseases might be a source of particular insight into what constitutes effective or appropriate communications. This interpretive description of health care …
Phenomenological Positivism and other Problematic Trends in Health Science Research
The growing enthusiasm for qualitative research in the health sciences may have created a climate in which methodologically perplexing research reports are becoming commonplace. In this article, the author challenges readers to consider the philosophical positions from which qualitative methods are derived and, in so doing, to reconsider the necessity for methodological integrity toward the overall purposes of knowledge development. A contemporar…
Exploring the Expansive Properties of Interpretive Description
There is an ever-present need to challenge, create, and expand upon qualitative research approaches in the applied and practice disciplines to avoid repeating mistakes of the past and to realize a research agenda for socially just practice. Toward these goals, anti-oppressive researchers engage with a variety of methodologies to co-produce accounts that reflect a comprehensive understanding of social problems with the people who experience them a…
On the Evolving World of What Constitutes Qualitative Synthesis
As the body of available qualitatively derived knowledge expands, there is increasing temptation to capitalize on it to generate knowledge synthesis products. Concurrently, in the wake of an ever-expanding enthusiasm for evidence-based practice knowledge in health care, scholars are facing pressure to forgo the more narrative or interpretive form of literature review in favor of reviews that are positioned as explicitly systematic. This has creat…
Communication Challenges for Chronic Metastatic Cancer in an Era of Novel Therapeutics
Advances in the production of novel therapies for cancer management are creating new challenges for the support of increasing numbers of persons surviving for extended periods with advanced disease. Despite incurable and life-limiting metastatic conditions, these patients are living longer with serious disease, pushing the boundaries of what science explains and clinicians can confidently interpret using available evidence. Here we report finding…
Data Expressions or Expressing Data
Oral health in long-term care
Improving the Time to Diagnosis After an Abnormal Screening Mammogram
It's a Sentence, Not a Word
Keyword analysis has been championed as a methodological option for expanding the insights that can be extracted from qualitative datasets using various properties available in qualitative software. Intrigued by the pioneering applications of Clive Seale and his colleagues in this regard, we conducted keyword analyses for word frequency and "keyness" on a qualitative database of interview transcripts from a study on cancer communication. We then …
Rolls of the Warwickshire and Coventry Sessions of the Peace, 1377-1397
Mothers with chronic illness
In the context of a larger qualitative study, a database including extensive interviews with a subset of sixteen chronically ill mothers was obtained. Secondary analysis revealed that the women's concerns about themselves and their children included issues of performance, availability, dependency, and socialization. Further, these women reported that the health care system seemed incapable of recognizing or accounting for the profound interrelati…
Methodological Orthodoxy in Qualitative Nursing Research
In this analysis, the applicability of orthodox qualitative research traditions to the questions of nursing science is considered from a critical perspective. The theoretical traditions of ethnography, phenomenology, and grounded theory are examined in light of their relationship to the larger projects of anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. From that perspective, the questions inherent to nursing science are distinguished, revealing major de…
Phenomenological Positivism and other Problematic Trends in Health Science Research
The growing enthusiasm for qualitative research in the health sciences may have created a climate in which methodologically perplexing research reports are becoming commonplace. In this article, the author challenges readers to consider the philosophical positions from which qualitative methods are derived and, in so doing, to reconsider the necessity for methodological integrity toward the overall purposes of knowledge development. A contemporar…
A Protocol for Researcher Safety
Although there is an abundance of literature about how to conduct qualitative research and some consideration of possible threats to researchers’ psychological well-being, there is little mention of the personal safety issues that researchers face while in the field. Few researchers have attempted to address the issue of researcher safety as a methodological concern. Consequently, there are minimal guidelines available to researchers to prevent a…
Living with Diabetes as a Transformational Experience
The construct of transformation has been presented in many research studies as the epitome of living with a chronic illness. Because it has been inadequately defined, however, many other concepts (e.g., hope, meaning, control) are used in ways that suggest considerable overlap and correspondence with transformation. This article represents an attempt to explicate the structures and processes of transformation as they were revealed in a qualitativ…
Meta-Study of Qualitative Health Research
Oral health in long-term care
Improving the Time to Diagnosis After an Abnormal Screening Mammogram
Chronic Illness Experience
Concurrent with the recent enthusiasm for qualitative research in the health fields, an energetic call for methods by which to synthesize the knowledge has been generated on various substantive topics. Although there is an emerging literature on meta-analysis and meta-synthesis, many authors overestimate the simplicity of such approaches and erroneously assume that useful knowledge can be synthesized from limited collections of study reports with…
Influence of the Research Frame on Qualitatively Derived Health Science Knowledge
Although qualitative researchers generally acknowledge that their theoretical location and methodological orientation will influence the findings of their inquiries, it has been less well understood how the body of knowledge within a substantive field might be shaped by these factors. In this article, the authors draw on insights obtained from their experiences attempting to synthesize qualitative research findings. From that reflective process, …
The Structure of Everyday Self-Care Decision Making in Chronic Illness
As health care reform strategists increasingly recognize the critically important potential of effective everyday self-care decision making for reducing the burden of illness and the strain on health service systems, wemust find ways to understand and support it. In this study, the authors investigate persons with expertise in self-care management of type 2 diabetes,HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis to understand how everyday self-care decision ma…
Qualitative Metasynthesis
In an era of pressure toward evidence-based health care, we are witnessing a new enthusiasm for qualitative metasynthesis as an enterprise distinct from conventional literature reviews, secondary analyses, and the many other scholarly endeavors with which it is sometimes confused. This article represents the reflections of five scholars, each ofwhom has authored a distinct qualitative metasynthesis strategy. By providing the reader a glimpse into…
Health Care Communication Issues in Multiple Sclerosis
Communication between persons with chronic illness and their professional health care providers is a critical element of appropriate health care. As the field of health care communication evolves, it becomes apparent that aspects of the illness experience shared by those affected by specific diseases might be a source of particular insight into what constitutes effective or appropriate communications. This interpretive description of health care …
The Analytic Challenge in Interpretive Description
The past decade has witnessed remarkable evolution within qualitative health research as scholars have moved beyond initial adherence to the specific methods of phenomenology, grounded theory, and ethnography to develop methods more responsive to the experience-based questions of interest to a practice-based discipline. Interpretive description ( Thorne, Reimer Kirkham, & MacDonald-Emes, 1997 ) is an inductive analytic approaches designed to crea…
Land Mines in the Field
In this commentary, the authors encourage a renewed enthusiasm for attention to quality criteria in qualitative health research by poking fun at what they understand to be patterns and themes emerging from data collected in their respective extensive 'fieldwork' experiences within the genre. Conceptualizing some of the particularly problematic interpretive turns as land mines in the field (or, alternatively, missteps in the dance, cracks in the p…
Hope and Probability
Although the complexities inherent in human communication make it a difficult target for empirical investigation and systematic interpretation, it is well recognized that patientprovider communication can have either a powerfully negative or positive influence on the experience of cancer. Drawing on an extensive data set derived from interviews with 200 cancer patients, the authors examine the impact of information provided in numerical form with…
Exploiting Exceptions to Enhance Interpretive Qualitative Health Research
Although it has long been understood that a well-constructed data set ought to be filled with complexities and contradictions, observations that challenge or contradict analytic interpretations are not often given sufficiently serious attention in the methodological qualitative health literature. When researchers attempt to produce comprehensive or 'holistic' findings, they all too often set aside or gloss over the negative cases that fail to con…
Truth Telling” and Cultural Assumptions in an Era of Informed Consent
Patient and healthcare provider communication is vital in cancer care and aspects of the patients' experiences provide valuable insight to what constitutes effective cancer communication. In this article we describe the communication experiences of patients from nondominant cultures who accessed Canadian-based cancer services. The findings enabled us to thoughtfully reflect on Western ideals about autonomy and responsibility and their relationshi…
Men, Masculinities, and Prostate Cancer
Patient-physician communication is vital in cancer care, and aspects of the patients' experiences provide insight into what constitutes effective cancer communication. Complexities inherent in prostate cancer regarding screening, treatment(s) efficacy, and side effects commonly form the basis of patient-physician discussions. However, the specificities of patient-physician communications, particularly in the male dyad, and the connections to masc…
Data Expressions or Expressing Data
Patient Real-Time and 12-Month Retrospective Perceptions of Difficult Communications in the Cancer Diagnostic Period
Communication is a notoriously complex challenge in the cancer care context. Our program of research involves exploration of patient-provider communications across the cancer trajectory from the patient perspective.Toward this end, we have been following a cohort of 60 cancer patients, representing a range of tumor sites, from immediately after diagnosis through to recovery, chronic, or advanced disease. Drawing on interpretive description analyt…
Toward Methodological Emancipation in Applied Health Research
In this article, I trace the historical groundings of what have become methodological conventions in the use of qualitative approaches to answer questions arising from the applied health disciplines and advocate an alternative logic more strategically grounded in the epistemological orientations of the professional health disciplines. I argue for an increasing emphasis on the modification of conventional qualitative approaches to the particular k…
Communication Challenges for Chronic Metastatic Cancer in an Era of Novel Therapeutics
Advances in the production of novel therapies for cancer management are creating new challenges for the support of increasing numbers of persons surviving for extended periods with advanced disease. Despite incurable and life-limiting metastatic conditions, these patients are living longer with serious disease, pushing the boundaries of what science explains and clinicians can confidently interpret using available evidence. Here we report finding…
It's a Sentence, Not a Word
Keyword analysis has been championed as a methodological option for expanding the insights that can be extracted from qualitative datasets using various properties available in qualitative software. Intrigued by the pioneering applications of Clive Seale and his colleagues in this regard, we conducted keyword analyses for word frequency and "keyness" on a qualitative database of interview transcripts from a study on cancer communication. We then …
Psychology (32 works) · Qualitative research (30 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Medicine (22 works) · Social science (22 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Engineering ethics (13 works) · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics (13 works)