Amsterdam 2015
Amsterdam 2015
Abstract book - Abstract - 3409
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Abstract #3409  -  "When I am 64" - Ageing and HIV
Session:
  51.5: "When I am 64" - Ageing and HIV (Parallel) on Friday @ 11.00-12.30 in C104 Chaired by Sarah Zetler,
Mylene Fernet

Authors:
  Presenting Author:   Dr Dana Rosenfeld - Keele University, United Kingdom
 
  Additional Authors:   
Aim:
To document and theorize how older (aged 50+) people living with HIV manage disclosure of HIV within multi-generational contexts and from the vantage point of later life.
 
Method / Issue:
Our London, UK-based, multi-method investigation into ageing with HIV conducted 74 life-history interviews and three focus groups with older white MSM and black African and white heterosexual men and women living with HIV. These data were systematically coded and analysed using grounded theory methods.
 
Results / Comments:
Analysis uncovered the centrality of timing in, and the idealised life course as an interpretive resource for, decision-making surrounding disclosure of HIV to children and/or parents. Because informants linked stigmatised beliefs to incorrect knowledge, they based disclosure decisions on potential recipients of disclosure’s (PRD) presumed knowledge of HIV, which they evaluated by reference to, inter alia, PRDs’ age, generation, and life course location. Informants who declined to disclose to their parents did on the basis of their parents’ ageing-related social disengagement and historical lack of exposure to developments in HIV treatment. Taken together, these characteristics made parents less knowledgeable about HIV, and thus more likely to be distressed by the disclosure, than were younger people. In contrast, informants assumed that children would become more aware of HIV with age as they (a) grew more socially, emotionally, and intellectually competent and thus more likely to recognize family members’ health and health practice as HIV-related, (b) entered a more adult world in which sexual relations held a core role and (c) were exposed to formal education about HIV. Informants explained that these developments, alongside concerns that their own health would decline with age, made disclosure to children more necessary over time. But these presumed developments also introduced dilemmas regarding timing disclosure to fit with changes in the lives of informants and their children. These dilemmas included the need to disclose to children at times in these children’s lives only after they were sufficiently mature to understand the information being disclosed but before they learned of informants’ HIV from others or by observing informants’ health and health practices, and when the disclosure would be least disruptive.
 
Discussion:
The use of assumptions about age and life-course location in decision-making regarding disclosure of HIV reflects a more nuanced engagement with age in the disclosure decision-making process than has been captured by previous research into HIV disclosure, including on the part of people ageing with HIV.
 
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