Selfies of Sickness: The Use of Video Diaries with Chronically Ill Children

Abstract

This paper describes the use of video diaries as a tool for understanding children’s patient experience and as a potential method for directly gathering patient experience information from children. It was hypothesized that this method would uncover otherwise hidden knowledge about children ages 10–16 years with chronic illnesses. The aim of this paper is to assess the potential applicability of this method as a standalone tool for the public healthcare sector to capture and better understand the patient experiences as a basis for continuous service development. Therefore, this paper does not describe the results on children’s patient experiences. The video diaries proved to offer rich data, but certain shortcomings were also identified. Motivating teens, especially boys, was found to be difficult. Needed changes are addressed, and suggestions for future work are presented.