Articles“I Have Always Felt Different”: The Experience of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Childhood
Section snippets
Setting and Sample
Participants were recruited from an office of disability services in a southeastern university. The researchers met with the disability services staff to explain the study and seek permission to recruit participants. The disability services staff agreed to assist the researchers by explaining the study to students who met the study criteria. After students were told about the study by the disability services staff, those who were interested in participating signed an interest list. The
Findings
According to existential phenomenology, every experience has a figure that stands out and a ground that is the context of the experience. In this study, the ground of the experience of ADHD was loneliness and isolation. As noted by one participant, “Can't anyone see I'm struggling?” Against the backdrop of this struggle, the figural theme of the experience of ADHD at home was “dealing with getting along (with my parents)”; the figural themes of the experience of ADHD at school were “I missed a
Discussion
These participants with ADHD recalled a childhood and adolescence shaped by feelings of difference, isolation, and misunderstanding. The parent–adolescent conflicts we found differed from the relationships observed in a study of hyperactive adolescent girls (Young, Chadwick, Heptinstall, Taylor, & Sonuga-Barke, 2005); in that study, parent–adolescent relationships were normal and functional. The differences, however, could be explained by the sample and design: Young et al. (2005) sampled
Nursing Implications
Our sample was composed of college-enrolled volunteers, primarily non-Hispanic White women, and thus, the findings from the study must be considered preliminary. Another limitation of the study was that the researchers were all White women. In addition, because the young adults in the study were enrolled in college and thus had attained some measure of success in their lives, at least academically, they may not be representative of the “typical” person with ADHD. Furthermore, because the sample
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge the Gamma Zeta Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International for partial funding of this study, Elizabeth Tornquist for her comments on earlier versions of this article, and the study participants for sharing important information about their lives.
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