Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus: Article Analysis

Summary of the Article The study entitled, “What Is It Like to Be a Child with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus?” by Sparapani, Jacob, and Nascimento (2015) is essentially where nineteen children between the ages of seven and twelve years old, who were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and had the diagnosis for at least one year were chosen and had parental consent to participate in the study while they were being treated in an outpatient clinic of a university hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The researchers (Sparapani, Jacob, and Nascimento, 2015) had the children make puppets that represented not only themselves but also people that they interacted with on a daily basis such as family members, friends, teachers, as well as devices such as syringes and glucose monitors. In order to collect data, the researchers used puppets and a stage in order to “create scenes that the children would encounter in their daily lives in order

Upon the analysis of the answers given by the children, Sparapani, Jacob and Nascimento (2015) determined that there were “four types of feelings emerged that described what types of experiences of ‘what it is like’ to be a child with type 1 diabetes: conflicting desires, insecurity, fear and pain.” Yet it was unclear as to how they made this determination besides them stating that after going through all the passages, categories and subcategories occurred, which in turn allowed data coding to be