Grounded Theory Approach to Middle-aged Women's Experience in Family Health Care

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to survey health requirements of middle-aged women and their families and to provide guidelines for developing nursing interventions by describing the process of family health maintenance experienced by middle-aged women and its conceptual system. METHODS: To get saturated data, each of four researchers conducted two or three times of in-depth interview with eight middle-aged women aged between 40-64 years old and living in Seoul and Chuncheon from the 10th to the 30th of October 2004 and each interview was continued one or two hours. The Grounded theory adopted by Strauss & Corbin (1998) is a substantive theory that can explain the experiencing process of middle-aged women. RESULTS: We found that the casual condition of family health maintaining by middle-aged women was "confidence of health belief", and "pouring by body moving" was found to be its phenomenon. A textual condition that might respond to the phenomenon was "fatal roles acceptance", and intervening conditions that promote their family health were "retracing" and "gathering health information". These intervening conditions impacted middle-aged women's confidence in family health and led them to take actions/interactions such as "being a model of health", "adapting to circumstances", "do-it-myself", "taking-care" "harmonious mind" and "the pursuit of cleanness". These actions/interactions produced results such as "being stronger", "being unmanageable" and "being fruitful". CONCLUSIONS: Health confidence and practical health behaviors were observed in the process that the middle-aged female participants experienced unmanageable circumstances but they accepted their roles and responsibilities and recognized that they must be get stronger. The behaviors of health-together-with were divided into enthusiastic type, adaptation type and self-sacrificing type. Therefore middle-aged woman with the understanding of family health maintaining process as well as the theoretical system and practical principals needs to implement the intervention in acceptable level of family health process of preventing psychological and physical problems.