Premium
Conditions of experienced stigma in people living with HIV in Iran: a qualitative comparative analysis
Author(s) -
Akbari Hossein,
Safari Saeid
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9566.13077
Subject(s) - stigma (botany) , thematic analysis , poverty , qualitative research , psychology , social support , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , quality of life (healthcare) , affect (linguistics) , clinical psychology , medicine , social psychology , psychiatry , psychotherapist , family medicine , sociology , social science , communication , economics , economic growth
Stigma against people living with HIV (PLWH) seriously affects their quality of life. Moreover it can lead them to hide their HIV status from others, which in turn endangers public health. Many studies dealing with HIV‐related stigma focus on the consequences of this phenomenon and pay less attention to the social conditions which affect different types of HIV‐related stigma (anticipated, internalized and enacted stigma [ES]). Therefore, in this study, we tried to achieve more understanding about effective causal conditions of various types of experienced stigma. First of all, data were collected from 19 PLWH, using semi‐structured interviews from those who had visited the Counseling Center for Behavioral Diseases in Mashhad. Secondly, the data were analyzed by applying a mixture of two methods: thematic analysis and qualitative comparative analysis (Boolean Algebra). The analysis of the data reveals that a combination of informing family members about HIV status, lack of family support, and medical support lead to anticipated stigma; a combination of religious beliefs and poor self‐esteem results in internalized stigma and a combination of lack of family support, mistreatment by community, poor self‐esteem, poverty and no religious beliefs lead to ES.