Women's Collective Meanings of Menopause:

Abstract

This paper describes the results of an exploratory content analysis to determine and categorize women's own conceptualizations of the menopausal experience. Data were derived from a nonclinical sample of 101 pre, peri, meno, and postmenopausal women aged 25-65 years in San Bemardino County, California. The paper addressed the following questions: (1) What were women's major perceptions regarding menopause and how did they evaluate those perceptions? (2) Did women's yrceptions differ by menopausal status or cause of menopause. (3) What were the major themes expressed in women's responses? (4) What was the relative importance of the physical experience of menopause compared to other aspects of it? and (5) How much commonality was there among women in their perceptions? Results showed that of the seven major dimensions, approximately fifty percent of all content mentions related to physical themes about menopause. Nearly one-fourth (24.1%) of all thematic mentions referred to the social dimension, and 18 percent were about emotional aspects of menopause. Mental, Vocational, Spiritual, and Life Cycle mentions appeared infrequently, occurring in only 5 percent of all mentions when combii. No major differences were found between the groups: pre, pen, menopausal, and postmenopausal, or between women whose menopausal status was surgically induced compared to those for whom it was a natural occurrence. A significant fmding of this study was that women overwhelmingly reported positive or neutral feelings in every major content dimension except Enwtional. More than half (57%) of all mentions pertaining to the emotional aspects of menopause were negative. Negative mentions were made primarily about depression, feeling old, moodiness and emotional instability, all of which appear in the emotional theme of feelings. Together these feelings accounted for about 42 percent of all the negative mentions. These fmdigs challenge the clinical stereotype of the "typical" menopausal woman and emphasize, not only the need for new conceptual categories of experience around life cycle events such as menopause but also for providing women with more opportunities for sharing their own stories and experiences about menopause.