Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare https://www.pagepressjournals.org/qrmh <p><strong>Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare</strong> is an interdisciplinary and international forum for qualitative research in healthcare settings. The journal is conceived as a site for dialogues between researchers, academics, and healthcare practitioners; it allows an exchange between multiple parties in the health and social service professions, patients and clients as well as senior and junior researchers who believe in the ethos of qualitative approaches. Qualitative research is reflexive. It takes into account that the empirical insights and theoretical propositions it produces are ontologically consequential for all those involved in the research process. This journal publishes research that use many methods of data collection and numerous approaches to data analysis, ranging from systematic coding to mostly inductive, phenomenological and narrative approaches. Submissions can be either theoretical, empirical, or present state of the art reviews of important subject matter in the field, but they have to advance scholarly knowledge, and contribute to research practice in an original way. Each issue of <strong>Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare</strong> provides readers with peer-reviewed articles that examine: the illness experience from multiple and varied perspectives; constructions of health, illness and healthcare that highlight relational and global contexts; healthcare policies in various organizational and institutional settings; the pressures of neoliberalism on healthcare; attention to the communicative dynamics of the patient-provider relationship; narrative approaches to health.</p> PAGEPress Publications, Pavia, Italy en-US Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare 2532-2044 <p><strong>PAGEPress</strong> has chosen to apply the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License</strong></a> (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all manuscripts to be published.</p> “Constantly justifying my existence”: Lower-income, higher-weight Canadian adults’ stigma coping mechanisms https://www.pagepressjournals.org/qrmh/article/view/12480 <p>Individuals who are higher-weight and low-income may disproportionately experience weight and income stigmas in healthcare experiences compared to lower-weight, higher-income individuals. The ways that weight and income stigmas interact in healthcare should be better understood in order to provide better, less stigmatizing care to higher-weight, low-income patients. This study assesses how patients manage stigmatizing experiences in both healthcare and everyday experiences and how that impacts health seeking and stigma management behaviors through semistructured interviews with 11 higher-weight (Body Mass Index ≥30), low-income adults (≥18 years of age) in an Atlantic Canadian province. Participants took part in two interviews that focused on healthcare experiences and both positive and negative places/spaces. The two face-to-face interviews for each participant (total 21 interviews) were audio-recorded and professionally transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify recurring concepts and patterns within the data. Two major themes emerged from the data, <em>uptake of stigmatizing</em>, <em>neoliberal health messaging</em> and <em>coping with stigma</em>. <em>Coping with stigma</em> included subthemes c<em>ontrol over stigmatizing experiences</em> and <em>stoicism in the face of stigma</em>. The findings suggest that individuals understand their health and wellness through a neoliberal lens and that they deploy strategies of control and stoicism to cope with the stigmas they face.</p> Lee Turner Andrea E. Bombak Copyright (c) 2024 the Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 2024-11-20 2024-11-20 8 3 10.4081/qrmh.2024.12480