Health-seeking behavior of Korean women with myocardical infarction

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to generate a theory of HSB among Korean women with MI with regard to their experiences of MI at the time of symptom presentation, and the process of treatment seeking. Grounded theory was chosen to explore the experiences of Korean women with MI at the time of symptom presentation to identify Korean women's health-seeking process in getting optimal treatment. Eighteen women participated for 24 interviews using a theoretical sampling from two university hospitals. Twenty-two open-ended interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and then constant comparative analysis was chosen to achieve saturation of theory. The core phenomenon experienced by Korean women was "finding out what's going on and relieving symptoms." The process of HSB for seeking treatment was a sequential and iterative cognitive process. The concepts of health seeking behavior of Korean women with MI were "experiencing symptoms," "attributing symptoms," "evaluating situation," "managing symptoms," "consulting others about symptoms," "getting an optimal treatment," and "maintaining optimal health." Women performed a series of actions through the process from the time of symptoms onset to receiving optimal treatment and maintaining optimal health. For some women, the process was repeated if symptoms evolved and relapse occurred. Inner iteration loops happened among some women as women consulted symptoms to others. Women got alarmed at unusual and evolving symptoms which started from mild and non-specific symptoms ahead of MI. Attributing of symptoms was made based on previous experiences and the evaluating of situations directed the next step on how to relieve symptoms and identify the causes. After an optimal intervention, women paid attention to strategies for maintaining optimal health as an ongoing process. More systematic study of a larger sample size including women in rural areas is needed to compare HSB between two groups, women in rural areas and urban areas as a follow-up study.