IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v28y1989i9p945-956.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Views of what's wrong: Diagnosis and patients' concepts of illness

Author

Listed:
  • Hunt, Linda M.
  • Jordan, Brigitte
  • Irwin, Susan

Abstract

A group of women were interviewed about their construction of their illness experiences before they saw a physician and subsequently over a period of several months following consultation. It was found that the physician's input was one of many components of their post-consultation understanding of their illness. The women built up their understandings in an interactive process, drawing significantly on their prior histories, ongoing experiences and social worlds. They continually tried out, adjusted and reworked the construction of their illnesses to adapt them to the exigencies of everyday life. We conclude that illness explanations are dynamic entities whose adequacy is determined by their usefulness within the extra-medical social environment.

Suggested Citation

  • Hunt, Linda M. & Jordan, Brigitte & Irwin, Susan, 1989. "Views of what's wrong: Diagnosis and patients' concepts of illness," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 28(9), pages 945-956, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:28:y:1989:i:9:p:945-956
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(89)90324-9
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lawton, Julia & Peel, Elizabeth & Parry, Odette & Douglas, Margaret, 2008. "Shifting accountability: A longitudinal qualitative study of diabetes causation accounts," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 47-56, July.
    2. Budych, Karolina & Helms, Thomas M. & Schultz, Carsten, 2012. "How do patients with rare diseases experience the medical encounter? Exploring role behavior and its impact on patient–physician interaction," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 105(2), pages 154-164.
    3. Smith, Shannon L. & Quandt, Sara A. & Arcury, Thomas A. & Wetmore, Lindsay K. & Bell, Ronny A. & Vitolins, Mara Z., 2006. "Aging and eating in the rural, southern United States: Beliefs about salt and its effect on health," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 189-198, January.
    4. Kamat, Vinay R., 2006. ""I thought it was only ordinary fever!" cultural knowledge and the micropolitics of therapy seeking for childhood febrile illness in Tanzania," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 62(12), pages 2945-2959, June.
    5. Kamaldeep Bhui, 1997. "The Language of Compliance: Health Policy and Clinical Practice for the Severely Mentallyill," International Journal of Social Psychiatry, , vol. 43(3), pages 157-163, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:28:y:1989:i:9:p:945-956. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.