Chapter 4 78 Results 40 participants (20 men and 20 women) were invited to participate in this interview study, and none declined the invitation. All participants indicated to be either married or living with a partner. In one interview, a partner of the participant was present in the background and without interference, all the other interviews were in a one-on-one setting between the interviewer and the participant. After the first 8 interviews, it became apparent to the research team that, even though participants knew that this study focused on the impact of gender on their illness experiences, they did not report gender as an explicit aspect in their illness experience unless explicitly asked. The research team was aware that analysing participant responses as gendered experiences solely based on their gender identity would aggregate individual responses to group level and would not adequately capture individual understanding of gender related aspects in their illness experiences and within-group heterogeneity. Specific interview questions related to the impact of participants’ gender identities were added to the interview guide to explore gender dimensions more explicitly. In total, 31 participants, 18 men and 13 women, were explicitly asked about the salience of their gender related self-concepts in their illness experiences and care provider preferences and are therefore included in this paper. As described in the method section, approximately 12 interviews per sub-sample would be sufficient for higher degrees of saturation and therefor no additional interviews were added to supplement the remaining interviews. Table 1 shows the selected demographic and clinical characteristics of the participants. Analysis revealed three main themes with four topics from the data related to the salience of gender in illness experiences and two themes related to gendered care provider preferences. The themes are summarized in table 2 with practical exemplar question for clinicians and researchers. Salience of gender in illness experiences of people with PD Obscureness of gender In most of the interviews, gender-related aspects were not explicitly made relevant or reported in the lived experiences of participants. When participants were explicitly asked whether there were aspects of living with PD that they felt were specific to their gender identity, a common response was a sense of confusion. Several participants stated that they lacked the reference from another gender identity to be able to answer the question, highlighting how the understanding of their own gendered experience hinged on the comparison with a different gender identity. “Interviewer: “Are there aspects of Parkinson’s disease that you think are specific for you as a man?
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