Living with a chronic illness: Chinese-Canadian and Euro-Canadian women with diabetes—Exploring factors that influence management

The study reported on here was designed to address how Euro-Canadian and Chinese-Canadian women living with diabetes experience and manage their illness in their day to day lives, and the factors that influence daily management (diet, exercise, medication and blood testing). It was hypothesized that womenʹs patterns of diabetes management would be associated with (a) ethnicity and/or (b) fluency in English. It was also hypothesized that the extent to which women with diabetes (whether Chinese- or Euro-Canadian, fluent or not fluent in English) would carry out daily management in accordance with western health care practices would be associated with: (i) the extent to which desired professional care is experienced; (ii) the womanʹs awareness of facts as endorsed by health professionals (biomedical knowledge); and (iii) her satisfaction with the support received from family and friends. A total of 196 women were interviewed to explore these hypotheses. While we do not yet know the magnitude or relative importance of each of the independent variables, the findings from this study suggest that the management of diabetes is a complex construct, comprised of several components, each being influenced by a number of factors. How a woman managed her illness was not reducible to her ethnicity. Instead, the contextual features of her life, coupled with her ability to access resources seemed to organize the ways in which she managed her illness. Diabetes management therefore becomes a multifaceted phenomenon, which has to be understood within the mediating circumstances of a womanʹs life.