Family health narratives: midlife women's concepts of vulnerability to illness

Abstract: Perceptions of vulnerability to illness are strongly influenced by the salience given to personal experience of illness in the family. This article proposes that this salience is created through autobiographical narrative, both as individual life story and collectively shaped family history. The article focuses on responses related to health in the family drawn from semi-structured interviews with women in a qualitative study exploring midlife women's health. Uncertainty about the future was a major emergent theme. Most respondents were worried about a specified condition such as heart disease or breast cancer. Many women were uncertain about whether illness in the family was inherited. Some felt certain that illness in the family meant that they were more vulnerable to illness or that their relatives' ageing would be mirrored in their own inevitable decline, while a few expressed cautious optimism about the future. In order to elucidate these responses, we focused on narratives in

Object Details

• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Postprint ; begutachtet (peer reviewed) ; In: Health ; 12 (2008) 3 ; 275-293

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Soziale Probleme, Sozialdienste, Versicherungen

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (where): Mannheim
• (when): 2008
• Creator: Lindenmeyer, Antje ; Griffiths, Frances ; Green, Eileen ; Thompson, Diane ; Tsouroufli, Maria

Further information

• DOI: 10.1177/1363459308090049
• URN: urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-226245
• Rights: Open Access unbekannt; Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
• Last update: 25.03.2025, 1:49 PM CET