Sensemaking and care of diabetes: cognitive maps of doctors and patients compared

Abstract

Karl Weick, an exponent of constructivist cognitivism, considers sensemaking as a set of cognitive processes in continuous construction, a posteriori, of meaning and sense of the reality in which we live.
Sensemaking is a continuous process of creating everyday meaning: people selectively perceive information about themselves and the environment in which they live, this information is cognitively processed through a process of selection and retention in memory of the cognitive maps built.
Therefore sensemaking is an appropriate key to understanding behavioral phenomena in which representations of a problem are at stake, especially when it is extremely necessary to find points of contact regarding causal relationships among the elements that make up the different cognitive maps of individuals. who take part in it. The analysis of cognitive maps can be useful above all in order to identify and share with greater clarity what could be the roads for a correct and effective resolution or treatment of the problem.
Giving meaning to the disease means, both for the doctor and the patient, to organize a cognitive map (causal connections of elements of meaning) of reality (of the disease) in a continuous process of experience.
A continuous flow that starting from a subjectively selective perception of the available elements (knowledge, experiences, events, etc.), organizes these elements in a map and translates them into an operational scheme of behavior. According to Weick, individual reality is built, while the environment, the context, are built a priori.

The cognitive maps that individuals construct will influence the subsequent experiences that they will have to face within the same problem, in this case related to the diabetic disease.
The use of sensemaking applied to the analysis of the care processes, therefore, can become particularly useful in treatment contexts in which compliance and adherence to treatment is a determining factor in the management of chronic pathology, which provides a model of doctor-patient relationship protracted over time and centered on the possibility of comparison with respect to the methods of treatment and success of the same.
The research has therefore proposed to investigate through the submission of interviews to doctors and patients and to the subsequent analysis of the text and lingusitiche recurrences elaborated through appropriate software to reconstruct and compare the respective cognitive maps that are at the base of the representations of the disease and of its management and therefore of the consequent behaviors of those who care and those who are cared for.