Proposal Title
Picturing Health Picturing Life: Narratives of Living with Type 2 Diabetes
Abstract
Black American women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and 2.5 times more likely to die from T2D than white American women. These stark statistics tell us the “what” of the disparity in outcomes for women with T2D, but not their stories and illness experiences. As interventions are devised to help reduce these disparities in the ever-growing population of women with T2D, it is essential to consider how these women cope with this complex quotidian illness in the context of the intersection of discrimination due to race, gender, and poverty. This narrative illness study provides a framework for fourteen Black women living in Boston, Massachusetts to tell their illness narratives through participant generated photography, photo elicitation interview (PEI) and relational map making. This study, utilizing multiple methodologies, outlines a method for collecting in-depth participant generated qualitative data, creating narratives using these data, and illuminating the complexity of these women's experience. The insights contained within this narrative study can help medical professionals and academics, who often come from places of privilege, communicate with their patients more effectively by validating and recording the lived experience of these women. The narrative methods in this study facilitates participants to powerfully express the complexity of their experience. These stories of illness shed new light on the statistics of health inequality.
Start Date
28-3-2018 3:10 PM
End Date
28-3-2018 4:00 PM
Presentation Type
Paper
Disciplines
Medicine and Health Sciences
Picturing Health Picturing Life: Narratives of Living with Type 2 Diabetes
U-Hall 3-094
Black American women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and 2.5 times more likely to die from T2D than white American women. These stark statistics tell us the “what” of the disparity in outcomes for women with T2D, but not their stories and illness experiences. As interventions are devised to help reduce these disparities in the ever-growing population of women with T2D, it is essential to consider how these women cope with this complex quotidian illness in the context of the intersection of discrimination due to race, gender, and poverty. This narrative illness study provides a framework for fourteen Black women living in Boston, Massachusetts to tell their illness narratives through participant generated photography, photo elicitation interview (PEI) and relational map making. This study, utilizing multiple methodologies, outlines a method for collecting in-depth participant generated qualitative data, creating narratives using these data, and illuminating the complexity of these women's experience. The insights contained within this narrative study can help medical professionals and academics, who often come from places of privilege, communicate with their patients more effectively by validating and recording the lived experience of these women. The narrative methods in this study facilitates participants to powerfully express the complexity of their experience. These stories of illness shed new light on the statistics of health inequality.
