The general aim of this proposed 48-month qualitative, anthropological study is to examine the experience The general aim of this proposed 48-month qualitative, ethnographic study is to examine the experience of suffering among elders and its relation to health, gender, and ethnicity. Persons largely experience suffering through immersion in a profoundly difficult event or episode. Suffering may be closely related to one's core sense of identity. While elders in general are better educated, of higher income, more active, healthier, and less disabled than in previous decades, many elders have experienced profound suffering in such events as illness, loss, depression, pain, racism and poverty life course disappointment, family conflict and existential crisis. Others, born abroad, may have experienced difficult events connected with war, genocide, migration, and displacement, suffering may be shaped in relation to other characteristics and events such as the nature of illness, affiliation with a particular spiritual tradition or gender. The view of suffering taken here is based on prior research, that suffering is profoundly personal and subjectively irreducible (as with all elements of personal meaning). Suffering is best studies through close examination and attention to contexts and qualities of experience. The ability to """"""""tell about"""""""" suffering to another is useful in such an examination. For purposes of this study, suffering will be defined in a general way as a direct or vicarious negative experience that is intense, prolonged and painful in some way, that is usually a non-normal condition of being, that challenges everyday, taken-for-granted realities, and that forces or shapes some re-evaluation of personal meaning or sense of identity. In the proposed research, four specific aims are offered. Research will consist of multi-part ethnographic interviews with 180 elders stratified by ethnicity, gender, and self-rated health. Not all informants will have experienced suffering firsthand, Data analysis will be undertaken, involving the development of a text base and use of standard qualitative data analytic techniques.
| Canham, Sarah L (2009) The Interaction of Masculinity and Control and its Impact on the Experience of Suffering for an Older Man. J Aging Stud 23:90-96 |
