Non Peer Reviewed
Older men talking about health
Chris McVittie
Queen Margaret University College
Joyce Willock
Queen Margaret University College
When older men talk about health and illness they represent themselves differently. To illustrate this argument, we report here findings from a semi-structured interview study conducted with 10 males aged 65 years and over. Participants were asked about health, ill-health and the circumstances in which they would seek medical help. Discourse analysis of responses indicates that participants draw upon various notions of the self, implicating (1) biology, (2) phenomenological experiences of health and illness, and (3) constructions of masculine identities. Contradictory versions of the self are combined to account for health and ill-health and to make relevant specific possible health behaviours. Rather than being a unitary concept, the self can thus be viewed as a set of linguistic resources deployed to accomplish particular outcomes.
