'Pressure of life': ethnicity as a mediating factor in mid-life and older peoples' experience of high blood pressure.

Hypertension is a common condition which disproportionately affects African Caribbean people in England, yet this experience is rarely reported in the literature. Whilst a body of literature exists that explores chronic illness experience, little attention is paid to hypertension, nor to ethnicity as a mediating concept in chronic illness experience. This paper explores the meaning and consequences of hypertension for African Caribbean people residing in England. The study conducted was a qualitative study, informed by the ethnographic tradition. The study methods included the conduct of two focus group interviews (10 participants), 21 in-depth interviews and five vignette interviews. Thirty-six people in total participated in the study, both men and women, aged between 37 and 82 years (median age = 59.5 years) in two English cities. The sample was generated by contacting GP surgeries, community groups and associations and included economically active and retired people. The narrative accounts provided illuminate the personal biographies of the mid-life and older participants in the study, providing evidence as to how issues such as ethnicity, migration, cultural adaptation, racism and discrimination may impact upon the chronic illness experience. Participants' understandings of their self-defined condition of high blood pressure differed greatly from medical conceptualisations of the condition of hypertension. The implications of the study are that in order to provide effective health and social care for individuals of African Caribbean origin with hypertension, care-providers require insight into how migration and cultural adaptation may create major disruption to an individual's life trajectory, to which the subsequent diagnoses of chronic illness are relative in terms of the individual's response and adaptation.