Illness as a Social Construct: Understanding What Asthma Means to the Patient to Better Treat the Disease

Children and adolescents with moderate to severe asthma used Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA) to create visual narratives of their experiences living with and managing asthma to understand the social forces at work on the patient's experience of illness and his or her responses to it.

Abstract

Participants' visual narratives yielded a unique understanding of illness as a social construct. Patients with comparable disease states had different illness experiences, sometimes motivating health-related behaviors that appeared inconsistent with the management needs of the disease. Improvement in outcomes and patient satisfaction may be achieved through a broader understanding of illness in the social context of patients' lives.