Abstract
AbstractRepresentations of peri/menopause are influential in relation to how peri/menopause is understood and how peri/menopausal women are perceived, both of which have important implications for health and wellbeing. In this paper, we report results from a story completion study with 102 undergraduate psychology students. Participants were invited to write a response to a fictional scenario about a peri/menopausal woman. Thematic analysis was used to construct two themes. In the first theme, Women’s bodies out of control, we report how students represented peri/menopausal women’s bodies as unpredictable and uncontrollable. In the second theme, Doctors as empathetic experts: A (biomedical) problem in need of (medical) intervention, we demonstrate how participants wrote stories that portrayed peri/menopause as a medical problem to be easily and effectively resolved by a doctor. These doctors were consistently characterized as empathetic and as experts of peri/menopause. We consider the extent to which these fictional stories might (or might not) map onto women’s lived experiences of peri/menopause by drawing on extant literature. Our results contribute to understandings of how young people represent peri/menopause and peri/menopausal women. These results have implications for educators in ensuring that menopause is included in their curricula, and for health professionals in their practice.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Developmental and Educational Psychology,Social Psychology,Gender Studies
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