Paper short abstract:

Sensory experiences of adults with schizophrenia are poorly understood due to Eurocentric biases in sensory processing measures. In response, this paper makes a case for greater use of ethnographic methods in the health sciences to understand sensory experience as emergent, co-constructed phenomena.

Paper long abstract:

Research in neuroscience and clinical psychology has found that adults diagnosed with schizophrenia have atypical sensory processing patterns, such as difficulty filtering out repetitive and/or unwanted sensory stimuli (i.e., sensory gating deficits), and acute sensitivity towards sensations (e.g., noise) (Landon et al., 2016). Measures such as the Adult/Adolescent Sensory Profile (AASP) (Brown & Dunn, 2002) construct a “sensory profile” about someone’s responses to sensory stimuli, to guide clinical professions in their clinical decision-making. However, the AASP has two significant limitations in its application to a schizophrenia context: 1) it was developed, standardized and normed with children without disabilities in the U.S.; and 2) it evaluates sensory experiences in isolation and out of context, when sensory experiences are in fact polysensorial, context-specific, and historical. To study the relationship between participation in daily activities and lived sensory experiences in a southeastern U.S. town, we used a combination of video-elicitation, photo-elicitation, semi-structured interviews, and the AASP. Participants chose which of their daily activities would be video recorded, and engaged in collaborative analyses with the research team as they watched and discussed the video recording of their engagement in a meaningful activity. This collaborative approach enabled us to understand our interlocutors as active sensory beings, whose participation in activities were predicated upon embodied, sensorial ways of knowing. We therefore argue that ethnography provides one possible means with which clinicians and researchers can work towards the appreciation (not appropriation) of their interlocutors’ lived sensory experiences, and to critique Eurocentric norms embedded within measures and scales.