Transformative and therapeutic benefits of digital storytelling: a phenomenological lifeworlds study of Patient Voices participant experiences.

Background: References to transformative and therapeutic benefits of digital storytelling are often made, yet this remains an under-explored area, which we foreground in this study.

Methods: A phenomenological research design was adopted to explore through interview how a purposive sample of Patient Voices storytellers experienced participation in more than one digital storytelling workshop. Analysis was through thematic coding, linguistic analysis and use of van Manen's lifeworld existentials framework.

Results: We find that for this particular group, the therapeutic and transformative experiences that re-centre and re-frame personal meaning do so through inter-personal connections and can be understood as a process of social learning. The lifeworld existentials analysis demonstrates that a pluralist and relational conception of wellbeing holds and there is a close relationship between this and Yalom's 11 therapeutic factors.

Conclusions: Drawing on group analytic literature, we suggest the concept of a social learning methodology as useful in grounding further research that seeks to understand the beneficial impacts of digital storytelling methodologies in healthcare and in contributing evidence in this field with fidelity to the lived experience as central.