What is the meaning of the "lived experience"?

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Throughout my program, we have been asked to describe and explore others' "lived experience". I was thinking about this and realized that I don't have clear idea what a lived experience means. I always assumed that the lived experience is another term for how a certain situation looks from an individual's perspective. For example, the lived experience of a nurse is different from the lived experience of a patient.

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Specializes in Med/Surg, Ortho, ASC.

I have never heard of that term. This is a nursing program?

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.

I think.....Every one has their own lived experiences that influence how they look at things how they respond to things. Our past influences who we are and how we respond to things.

For example...You can have a patient overreacting to a thunder storm and you think this patient is a drama queen and auditioning for an OSCAR. Then you find out they lost their entire family to a tornado 3 months prior.

It means to take a moment to understand and empathize with your patient and how their culture, religion, history influences who they are and how the interpret data.

YEARS ago my husband was on a tour of an airline manufacturer when she stopped in front of a line of pictures filled with WWII B17 bombers all lined up....she became strangely quiet and said...."So this is where they all came from....." She grew up in Leipzig, Germany and was in Germany during the allied bombing of Germany. She hated fireworks.

Living in Germany during WWII and living through Allied/American bombings of Germany left an indelible mark on her life.

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.

I Googled it...

Designing to support motivation is an increasingly important issue, especially as pervasive technologies are used to facilitate various healthy behaviour changes. There are many motivation theories but these do not map specifically to inform design. In 'Motivating Mobility' we explore the lived experiences of motivation of people with stroke, in order to design rehabilitation technologies. Motivation varies between people, between contexts and over time and can be 'difficult to express', particularly for those with communication problems. We describe development of a theoretically based toolkit, principled in both content and form, and using multiple modes of communication, aimed at gathering motivational requirements in order to inspire design. We show use of the toolkit, discuss the rich data collected and reflect on how well the approach works and ties requirements, via their elicitation tool, back to theory. This toolkit has potential to inform design for motivational effect in similar pervasive health applications.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6038766&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6038766

OP are you in the US? Are you still in school?

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It sounds like an annoyingly redundant buzz-term to me. "Lived" as opposed to what.... fake experience? Imaginary experience? Experience by proxy? By definition, isnt all experience "lived"?

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Specializes in NICU.

All experience is not lived experience. You can survive a tornado and be very afraid, but you can experience the devastation on the evening news and be fearful of tornadoes. Living through World War II is a lived experience, watching a documentary is experience but not a lived experience.

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Yes, I am attending the BSCN program

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@Esme12, no, I'm in Canada and yes I am still in school.

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Specializes in Med Surg.

"The lived experience" is all the rage in many nursing programs.

Basically, it is a type of qualitative perspective that is very attractive to people who want to pretend to sound smart.

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