Everyday health and identity management among older women with chronic health conditions

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Abstract

The majority of older women have at least one chronic health problem and coping with multiple conditions is common with advancing old age. In this longitudinal, qualitative study we explored the health perceptions of older women (N = 36) with multiple chronic conditions. Guided by a symbolic interactionist perspective, our research questions asked: (a) how do older women with chronic health conditions interpret their own health in their everyday lives and (b) how do they talk about their health with others. We found that women depended on their embodied self, or signs from the body, to interpret their everyday health. The women engage in identity management to make sense of limitations caused by their chronic health conditions. They regulated how much and with whom they were willing to share issues related to their everyday health. Findings suggest that everyday health is important in identity construction among older adults.

Section snippets

Symbolic interactionism

In spite of age-related declines, older people tend to rate their overall health as “good” and report high levels of well-being in late life. Symbolic interactionism (Stryker 1968) and its theoretical derivatives have emerged as a way of explaining this resiliency among older adults. For example, researchers have used the concept of possible selves to explain how older adults cope with negative change in late life (Frazier et al., 2000, Hoppmann et al., 2007). Possible selves are motivational

Data collection

The data used for this study was collected as part of a larger investigation of behavioral and psychosocial influences on the quality of life of rural older adults with chronic health conditions. The Center for Gerontology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) generated a database in 2000 of 2034 older adults living in the southwest region of Virginia using a targeted random sampling design in which persons age 65 or older participated in a telephone interview

Everyday health

Although the interview protocol was designed initially to understand how women coped with heart disease, osteoporosis, and diabetes in particular, it became apparent that these conditions alone did not necessarily influence how the women evaluated their health. Similar to Penrod, Gueldner, and Poon (2003), whose older focus group participants talked about their health holistically rather than along diagnostic pathways for each condition, we found that the women in our sample were more able or

Conclusion

Using a symbolic interactionist perspective to examine the ways in which older women with chronic conditions perceived their health in the context of their daily lives we found that the intersection of various selves – particularly the embodied, aging, and social selves – rather than presence of an illness, accounted for women's perception of their everyday health. Everyday health refers to the daily, bodily feelings and sensations the women drew upon to evaluate their health. It was not until

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Project No. VA-135688 of the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station.

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