MAKING SENSE OF SYMPTOMS - SELF-CATEGORIZATION AND THE MEANING OF ILLNESS AND INJURY

A central theme in both medical sociology and health psychology is how people make sense of their symptoms. Both literatures, despite their stress on different aspects of the health evaluation process, see illn ess in terms of matching present symptoms to an underlying understandi ng of illness. In this paper we argue that such accounts have difficul ty in explaining the impact of contextual factors on how symptoms are valuated. We therefore propose a model based on self-categorization th eory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987). It is proposed that symptoms are evaluated, not against pre-existing illness represen t anions, but by reference to their impact on Situationally salient id entities. In support of this an experiment is described which involves students who are training to be physical education (PE) teachers. The y are defined either in terms of a 'PE student' identity or in terms o f a 'gender' identity and asked to evaluate a number of scenarios whic h describe different illnesses and injuries. Overall, the results prov ide clear evidence that the significance ascribed to scenarios depends on which identity is salient and hence indicate the viability of a se lf-categorization theory approach to symptom evaluation.