BACKGROUND: Menopause is part of working women’s lives. In Western countries, labour market patterns are changing rapidly: women’s labour participation has increased, the percentage of full-time working women is rising, and retirement age is increasing. OBJECTIVE: This narrative literature study aims to provide an insight in the state of the art in the literature about the relationship between menopause, work and health and to identify knowledge gaps as input for further research. METHODS: The search was conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, MEDLINE and ScienceDirect. The final set includes 36 academic articles, 27 additional articles related to the topic and 6 additional sources. RESULTS: Research on menopause, work and health is scarce. Results are grouped thematically as follows: Menopause and (1) a lack of recognizing; (2) sickness absence and costs; (3) work ability; (4) job characteristics; (5) psychosocial and cultural factors; (6) health; (7) mental health, and (8) coping and interventions. Work ability of women with severe menopausal complaints may be negatively affected. CONCLUSIONS: Due to taboo, menopause remains unrecognised and unaddressed within an organisational context. New theoretical and methodological approaches towards research on menopause, work and health are required in order to match the variety of the work contexts world-wide.
Participatory action research (PAR) advocates end-user involvement in various societal domains. This paper aims to identify and analyse impacts of PAR involving older persons as co-researchers, and how these impacts spread and are enhanced throughout the research process and after its completion. By impact we mean transformational change throughout and after a PAR study. We present a qualitative community-based research project involving older people who live in sparsely populated areas in the Netherlands, and explore three types of PAR impact: personal, interpersonal and community impacts. We demonstrate how these impacts unfold through expanding circles, from a personal to a community level, and how these circles enhance each other. The project was conducted by a PAR team consisting of one researcher and seven co-researchers. The data were collected from observations, interviews and minutes of meetings, which the team subsequently analysed. The results are presented as a narrative account, whereby four project stages are followed by reflection on the impact it made. The discussion addresses the circles of impact, and whether and how they can strengthen each other in community-based projects involving older people. The concluding remarks address the influence of group dynamics on PAR, whether frail older adults can be expected to take an active part in PAR projects and the extent to which the results from such community-based PAR projects can be generalised.
The traditional approach towards the research on remembering at a later age has therapeutic connotations. It is usually associated with treatment techniques against depression or dementia. Within the context of social remembering studies, the role of eyewitnesses of the past is routinely assigned to the older generation. Within those research frameworks recollections are often treated as a ready-made means that can help older people to address their current problems. We shall argue that the essential value of remembering at a later age overrides such clinical applications and consists not in reviving the past as it ‘really happened’, but in re-evaluating it. In order to demonstrate this we shall draw on everyday remembering, purposely setting aside any structured form of reminiscing. The analysis will elucidate ethical shifts in attitudes towards the past and contribute to the discussion about the authenticity of memories.
The setting: 83 reports of healing related to prayer (HP) were evaluated between 2015 and 2020 in the Netherlands. Research questions: What are the medical and experiential findings? Do we find medically remarkable and/or medically unexplained healings? Which explanatory frameworks can help us to understand the findings? Methods: 83 reported healings were investigated using medical files and patient narratives. An independent medical assessment team consisting of five medical consultants, representing different fields of medicine, evaluated the associated files of 27 selected cases. Fourteen of them received in-depth interviews. Instances of healing could be classified as ‘medically remarkable’ or ‘medically unexplained’. Subsequent analysis was transdisciplinary, involving medical, experiential, theological and conceptual perspectives. Results: the diseases reported covered the entire medical spectrum. Eleven healings were evaluated as ‘medically remarkable’, while none were labelled as ‘medically unexplained’. A pattern with recurrent characteristics emerged, whether the healings were deemed medically remarkable or not: instantaneity and unexpectedness of healing, often with emotional and physical manifestations and a sense of ‘being overwhelmed’. The HP experiences were interpreted as acts of God, with a transformative impact. Positive effects on health and socio-religious quality of life persisted in most cases after a two and four year follow-up. Conclusions: the research team found it difficult to frame data in medical terms, especially the instantaneity and associated experiences in many healings. We need a broader, multi-perspective model to understand the findings. Horizontal epistemology, valuing both ‘subjective’ (experiential) and ‘objective’ data, may be helpful. An open dialogue between science and religion may help too. There is an analogy with healing narratives in the Bible and throughout church history. Future studies and documentation are needed to verify and clarify the pattern we found.
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