THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF WOMEN OF MEXICAN HERITAGE WITH HIV/AIDS (IMMUNE DEFICIENCY, PHENOMENOLOGY).
Contributors: University of Arizona.
Published: 1996
Number of pages: 291
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Women's Studies.; Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies.; Psychology, Clinical.
Description: The number of women of Mexican heritage with HIV/AIDS continues to escalate dramatically. Concurrently, salient psycho-social forces in women's environment impede access to health care and affect health outcomes. Yet, nursing's knowledge on the impact of HIV/AIDS on women of Mexican heritage is limited. Lacking in the nursing literature are the voices of women of Mexican heritage who have HIV/AIDS. The purpose of this study was to describe the lived experience of women of Mexican heritage with HIV/AIDS. Rogers' Science of Unitary Human Beings, the philosophy of phenomenology, and feminist perspectives provided the conceptual underpinning for this phenomenological study. The data were analyzed using an adapted procedure from Colaizzi (1978). The essential structure of the lived experience is a process of struggling in despair to endure having a fatal, transmittable, and socially stigmatizing illness which threatens crucial aspects of the woman's own self, being, and existence. Conditional support leaves the woman to suffer in silence as she confronts issues of fear of her own mortality and of transmitting HIV to others. Moreover, the woman experiences shame, blame, concern for children, and changes in normal human relationships.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-04, Section: B, page: 2475.

Thesis (PH.D.)--THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, 1996.

School code: 0009.