Identifying self-care behaviors in middle-aged women: A qualitative study

BACKGROUND: Women in their middle-age enjoy abilities that affect their health promotion and improvement. Throughout their entire lifetime, women strive to maintain and improve their health through benefiting from behaviors that come from experience. OBJECTIVE: This study was carried out with the aim of identifying self-care behaviors that middle-aged women consider as far as maintaining and promoting their health are concerned. METHODS: The study was conducted using a qualitative approach in conventional content analysis. Participants comprised of 20 middle-aged women from Zahedan, Iran in 2016 that were invited to enter the study using purposive sampling, and were given semi-structured interviews. After data collection, all interviews were transcribed, reviewed and then the subcategories were extracted. RESULTS: The findings of this study include a main category “preventive self-care behaviors” and three subcategories of “understanding health and disease”, “health knowledge” and “awareness of the health threats”. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that preventive self-care behaviors of women are associated with features such as understanding health and disease, health knowledge and awareness of the associated health risks. As a matter of fact, preventive behaviors encompass strategies that women apply to improve their physical and mental health.