title: Strategies adopted by late middle-age and older adults with HIV/AIDS to explain their physical symptoms.
abstract: Although the attributions individuals make about what causes their physical symptoms are known to influence their care seeking and self-care behaviours, much less is known about the strategies they use to arrive at these attributions. The strategies employed to understand the causes of their symptoms were investigated using in-depth interviews with 100 late middle-age and older adults with HIV/AIDS in New York City. The data revealed that most participants actively sought to explain their symptoms. The explanatory strategies identified included: relying upon illness or medication representations, lay beliefs about the body and ageing, invoking pre-existing vulnerabilities, engaging in lay experimentation, social comparison processes, considering temporal ordering and consulting authoritative sources. While most of them offered a single cause for their symptoms, some offered more complex multi-causal explanations. These findings provide understanding into the reasons why some older adults with HIV/AIDS misattribute symptoms resulting in delay in care or care over-utilisation, suggesting the need for patient education.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA. ks420@columbia.edu
authors.forename: Karolynn
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Siegel
authors.forename: Helen-Maria
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Lekas
authors.forename: Eric W
authors.initials: EW
authors.lastname: Schrimshaw
authors.forename: Courtney J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Brown-Bradley
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology; D001294:Attitude to Health; D005260:Female; D015658:HIV Infections / Q000150:complications* / Q000523:psychology*; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012919:Social Behavior