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C Blue

Publications and source records attributed to C Blue.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Living with a chronic illness: Chinese-Canadian and Euro-Canadian women with diabetes--exploring factors that influence management.

The study reported on here was designed to address how Euro-Canadian and Chinese-Canadian women living with diabetes experience and manage their illness in their day to day lives, and the factors that influence daily management (diet, exercise, medication and blood testing). It was hypothesized that women's patterns of diabetes management would be associated with (a) ethnicity and/or (b) fluency in English. It was also hypothesized that the extent to which women with diabetes (whether Chinese- or Euro-Canadian, fluent or not fluent in English) would carry out daily management in accordance with western health care practices would be associated with: (i) the extent to which desired professional care is experienced; (ii) the women's awareness of facts as endorsed by health professionals (biomedical knowledge); and (iii) her satisfaction with the support received from family and friends. A total of 196 women were interviewed to explore these hypotheses. While we do not yet know the magnitude or relative importance of each of the independent variables, the findings from this study suggest that the management of diabetes is a complex construct, comprised of several components, each being influenced by a number of factors. How a woman managed her illness was not reducible to her ethnicity. Instead, the contextual features of her life, coupled with her ability to access resources seemed to organize the ways in which she managed her illness. Diabetes management therefore becomes a multifaceted phenomenon, which has to be understood within the mediating circumstances of a woman's life.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1993

On chronic illness: immigrant women in Canada's work force--a feminist perspective.

Data from a comparative ethnographic study were examined to define factors that influence the management of illness among Euro-Canadian and first-generation Chinese women in the Canadian labour force. Compared with Euro-Canadians, Chinese women had a lower level of education, and more of them held blue collar jobs. Many of them had reservations about disclosing their chronic health problem (diabetes) to coworkers and employers, some fearing job loss if this information was revealed. Life circumstances prevented some of these individuals from properly managing their illness. In many cases they had difficulty gaining access to health facilities, learned little from health professionals, and had few resources to help them understand their condition. These complex issues that add to the burden of living with a chronic illness are not always recognized by health professionals, whose interactions with immigrant women are not structured to reveal the social context of the patient's illness.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1991

Women's perspectives on chronic illness: ethnicity, ideology and restructuring of life.

This inquiry into the lives of women living with a chronic illness brings to attention the complex processes that frame the existential meanings of illness. Data from immigrant Chinese and Anglo-Canadian women with diabetes are used to show that illness is constructed in a complex social, political and economic nexus. When the circumstances of women's lives are examined, styles of managing illness that could be attributed to ethnicity, become recognizable as pragmatic ways of dealing with the harsh realities of material existence. It is argued that the trends toward individualizing social problems, and shifting the responsibility for caretaking from the state to the individual, obfuscate the social context of illness, and exclude the socially disadvantaged from adequate health care.

Adaptation, Psychological↗