Comics

Abstract

Comics can be used to research healthcare practice and experiences with illness and caregiving. Comics can also be sources of data themselves: professional healthcare providers engaged in research use comics to understand their practice in order to improve it and to promote humanism in healthcare. Patients and caregivers create comics to share their personal accounts of illness and caregiving. Comics can also be a means for collecting data: asking research participants to draw comics of themselves and their experiences can offer data otherwise difficult to elicit. Comics are constructed narratives that can be analyzed for visual, textual, and narrative elements; gutters; style; influences; external references; and use of humor, as well as for what is present in a panel and what is absent. Using comics as a research tool allows access to autobiographical and emotional aspects of healthcare, enabling health humanities researchers to reconceptualize both practice and illness.