Paper
Thursday, 20 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Health Promotion Strategies
The Life History Interview Method to Intervention Development: Physical Activity in Older Mexican-American Women
Adelita G. Cantu, RN, MS, Department of Family Nursing, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA
Learning Objective #1: The learner will be able to name two important sociocultural patterns of a sample of older Mexican-American women.
Learning Objective #2: The learner will be able to apply qualitative narrative data to structure a culturally-appropriate health promotion intervention.
Context: Physical inactivity is an independent risk factor for CVD. Older Mexican-American women (60 years and over) are at increased risk of morbidity and mortality from CVD due to their high rates of physical inactivity. Interventions to increase physical activity have thus far have met limited success. Formative research is needed to exam the sociocultural factors that inform the decision of this targeted population to adopt and maintain physical activity. This is essential to the development of culturally-appropriate interventions that will be successful.

Aim: Record and analyze the sociocultural context, processes and patterns among older Mexican-American women living in a low-income, urban Southwestern city.

Methods: Ethnographic design using life histories to discover the sociocultural influences on perceptions within a smaple of nine women's lives that live in a low-income neighborhood. This methodology described how the participant’s have actively interacted with those influences to structure their behaviors, particularly physical activity.

Results: The women structure their behavior around the themes of family/kinship relationships and gender role expectations. These two sociocultural influences throughout their lives have embedded caregiving-both formal and informal (dutiful) as an essential expectation that structures much of their behavior. “Being there” or physical presence seems to be an important behavioral demonstration of the themes. Physical activity is seen as a behavior that has the potential to make the women unavailable for the things they value: family/kinship relationship and gender role expectations both requiring caregiving.

Conclusions: The sociocultural context appears to place high value on physical presence as a demonstration of their cultural values: family/kinship relationships and gender role expectations. Implications: A culturally-appropriate intervention reframed these individual’s perception of physical activity relative to being an activity that makes one unavailable for family; rather one that will make them available to family in the long-term. Designs of other interventions are discussed.

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