Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: American Women, Competing Information, and the Management of Midlife Risks

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Graduate student Jennifer Jo Thompson, supervised by Dr. Mark Nichter, takes the contemporary American experience of menopause as a key site for understanding how notions of risk operate in everyday experience, and how human beings use personal experience, and expert and lay resources to manage perceived risks. The researcher will investigate how women in the southwestern United States experience menopause, and how competing information about the risks related to menopause circulating in science, the media, and the popular press influences women's menopause management strategies. To generate data for this study, the researcher will use multiple ethnographic methods including interviews and focus groups with perimenopausal women, interviews with healthcare providers, participant observation at menopause-related educational and information sessions, and careful monitoring of the representations of menopause in science, media, and popular press. Data will be analyzed using qualitative open-coding and re-coding techniques to identify themes and thematic patterns. By focusing on how notions of risk operate not on the level of grand theory, but as a part of everyday experience, this research contributes to the understanding of how people negotiate information and risk discourses in their daily lives, the way these discourses are inscribed on bodies, and the way bodily practices are shaped in response. From an applied perspective, this study provides a model based on an exemplar case study for investigating patient decision-making in a pluralistic healthcare environment where the public is increasingly exposed to ambiguous or contradictory information about the risks and benefits of mainstream and alternative therapies. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.