Family and love as the ontological foci of the kalinga (caring) ethic in the Filipino worldview

ABSTRACT

This paper is part of a larger study by the same author entitled Kalinga (Caring) The Lived Experience of Filipino Cancer Survivors (Sasa, 2012), which utilized interpretative phenomenologic analysis (IPA) to capture the essence of the Filipino's epistemologic and ontologic concepts of care. Eight (8) Filipino cancer survivors were interviewed regarding their experiences about giving and receiving care. Their narratives were encoded, introspected and analyzed utilizing Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to arrive at an understanding of what caring means and how caring is conveyed. As a result of the study, a Filipino caring model was developed and was dubbed as the Kalinga model (Sasa, 2012). At the core of the model are family and love, which are the overwhelmingly dominating themes in the study based on the length and depth of narratives of the co-participants. This paper expounds on the inextricability of the concepts of family and love in the Kalinga (caring) ethic. Family and love as ontological foci of caring is in harmony with extant literature, and new insights on the same were explicated.