Investigating Women’s Health: The Story So Far

Abstract

This chapter, which connects theory of health and identity with investigation of health and identity, provides a stepping-stone between concept and people. The central aim is to investigate the individual experiences of women aged between 35–55 in relation to how their health identity is constructed and embodied throughout their life and to find out the impact of societal issues on these experiences. In addition to this, the study is grounded in a critical approach that considers social, cultural and political aspects of experience. In order to investigate how perimenopausal women construct their health identity and locate narratives within society, the following question, which has been considered in the theory chapters, is still pertinent to address these issues:

What health considerations have perimenopausal women undergone in lived experience and how have they used these to construct a health identity?

The approach, design and method of this qualitative study, is explained in this chapter so that this study can be replicated, re-analysed or at least applied to other questions of understanding social change.