An exploratory study of a Turkish sample of persons with hoarding behavior

Hoarding research in Turkey is still in an early stage, where both quantitative and qualitative research is needed to understand hoarding in the Turkish context. This is an exploratory qualitative study of a Turkish sample of individuals who exhibit compulsive hoarding behavior. The study consists of two phases. Firstly, an online hoarding screening survey (N=357) was conducted using three diagnostic tools (i.e., Saving Inventory-Revised, Hoarding Rating Scale, and Clutter Image Rating). Secondly, the participants (n=13) who met the criteria for hoarding disorder were invited to an online interview. Four participants agreed. Interview transcriptions were studied through the idiosyncratic case study approach of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, which enabled the researcher to discover four higher-order themes and their sub-themes that were common across the cases. They were: 1) “Guarding Against Failure,” whose sub-themes were “Fear of Not Having Something Necessary When Needed,” “Fear of Losing Financial Resources,” and “Fear of Losing Memories”; 2) “Rooted in the Family” whose sub-themes were “Like Mother Like Daughter,” “Modeling,” and “Shared Family Activity”; 3) “Triggering Traumatic Experience” whose two sub-themes were “Family Health Crisis,” and “Family Financial Crisis”; and 4) “Limited Insight & Distortion of Reality” with four sub-themes as “Normalization,” “Denial,” “Underestimation,” and “Justification.”While the results were in line with the cognitive-behavioral model of hoarding, the family-centered themes, such as hoarding as a family activity and traumatic events in the family, were salient in the participants’ experiences.