Experiencing Therapy through Doing: Making Quilts

Abstract

This study describes the concept of therapeutic benefits in doing, based on analysis of data from 2 years of ethnographic research with contemporary quilt making in North Carolina. The aim of the larger study was to describe and gain understanding of a popular occupation within the larger cultural, political, and socioeconomic context. The aim of the current study was to determine whether therapeutic aspects of quilting were part of the dialogue about quilting and, if so, how this aspect was described. Data were obtained from participant observation with nine quilt guilds and public quilting venues (stores and shows), review of quilting web sites, and interviews with 18 women. Coding of these data identified many themes, one of which was quilting as therapy. This code was used for any content that explicitly used the term therapy or spoke of ways that quilting was used to handle difficult circumstances or elicit a sense of well-being. For this article, all of the data coded as therapy were excerpted and analyzed further by reading and rereading them and organizing them into broad concepts that were refined by returning to the data. Ultimately two types of a self-generated therapeutic use of quilt making were identified—mundane and exceptional. Mundane therapy was part of women's daily routines, whereas exceptional therapy was taken up in response to difficult events or times in people's lives. These findings describe a possible link between occupation and health.