Qualitative Psychology, Vol 10(2), Jun 2023, 172-185; doi:10.1037/qup0000259
“Story Studio” is a bedside service of the Gifts of Art program at the University of Michigan Hospital, which provides adult hospital patients the opportunity to create a story, produce an edited digital recording, and receive the finished product for their own use. This article presents a rationale for Story Studio, then expands on our methods and procedures, from our first approach to a patient, to facilitating their storytelling, to working with the data of patients’ stories and their responses to follow-up interviews. We describe how hermeneutics, our principal theoretical approach, guides interpretative activity and goes beyond positivist, objectivistic methods that emphasize researcher “neutrality” to a salubrious, even therapeutic outcome. We also explain our use of additional, nomothetic methods of data analysis and how they work with data of individuals to result in more realistic aggregate data. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)