Negotiating Meanings of Stress: Interpretations of Diagnoses with Diabetes

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 28. Narratives about Chronic Illness

Abstract

Stress research has established the pathways through which life events predict varying mental health outcomes for individuals, but has given less attention to how individuals come to interpret these life events as stressors. Using data from 18 in-depth, open-ended interviews with individuals that have been diagnosed with either type 1 diabetes or type 2 diabetes, this paper uses diagnosis with a chronic illness as an empirical case to study how individuals interpret and give meaning to stressors they face. This paper also aims to fulfill a need in stress research to uncover the structural and cultural origins of the meanings that individuals give to stressors. Using the “Sort and Sift, Think and Shift” method of qualitative analysis, I find that the meanings given to diagnosis with a chronic illness as a stressor originate from three source levels: the individual level (e.g., biography, personality), the interpersonal level (e.g., social support, social comparisons), and the cultural level (i.e., cultural understandings, norms, and expectations about encountering and managing a given stressor). Organizing the origins of the meanings given to stressors by individuals into these three levels could allow scholars to understand what types of objective life circumstances lead to differential interpretations of a given stressor, as well as pinpoint at what level interventions can be implemented to alleviate stress. Empirically, findings indicate that the type of chronic illness and age at which an individual are diagnosed have significant influence on how an individual might interpret being diagnosed. This paper also suggest that life events might not be inherently strenuous, but are rather interpreted as more or less so based on other life circumstances.

Author

• Justin Maietta, University of Maryland, College Park