Methodological challenges in the use of focus groups with people with severe mental illness.

This study addresses the practical, methodological and ethical challenges that were found in three studies that used focus groups with people with severe mental illness, in the context of community mental health services in Brazil. Focus groups are a powerful tool in health research that need to be better discussed in research with people with severe mental illness, in the context of community mental health facilities. This study is based on the authors' experience of conducting and analyzing focus groups in three different cities - Campinas, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador - between 2006-2010.

The McGill Illness Narrative Interview - MINI: translation and cross-cultural adaptation into Portuguese.

This paper presents the process of translation and cultural adaptation into Portuguese of the McGill Illness Narrative Interview - MINI, an interview protocol that is used to research meanings and modes of narrating illness experiences, tested, in the Brazilian context, for psychiatric and cancer-related problems. Two translations and their respective back-translations were developed. In addition, semantic equivalence was evaluated, a synthesis version and a final version were prepared, and two pre-tests were administered to the target populations (people with auditory verbal hallucinations or breast cancer).

[Access to first-person experience in research into mental health].

This article presents and discusses the epistemological and methodological challenges related to the empirical study of first-person experience in mental health research. Considering the field of qualitative research, the methodological principles of phenomenology and medical anthropology are examined from a historical and conceptual perspective. The main operational concepts of the phenomenological method applied to empirical research, as well as their two main lines of approach, namely descriptive and psychological/transcendental phenomenology and hermeneutical or interpretative phenomenology, are described.