The meaning of menopause in a Newfoundland fishing village.

A comparison of etic and emic options for climacteric research shows that the emic option is best suited to the study of the meaning of menopause in the Southwest coast Newfoundland outport fishing village of Grey Rock Harbour. Standard menopause survey instruments, as the Neugarten Attitudes Toward Menopause checklist (1963) and the Datan et al. Sociocultural Patterns and the Involutional Crisis interview schedule (1981) were administered to 38 women and found to be of limited utility because they assume the following: that respondents can rank stimuli along linearly constructed continuums, that the questionnaire items contain sufficient contextual information for Harbour women to make psychosocial judgements such as agree and disagree, and that respondents are capable of and experience no difficulty in making public pronouncements based on insightful self-evaluations. More qualitative ethnographic description and emic analysis address, yet go beyond, the popular semantics of menopause to explore the meaning of middle-aging in the symbolic, moral and institutional spheres of Harbour life. For more suitable context for understanding the role that sociocultural factors can play in shaping women's experience of middle-aging, in depth analyses of the following are offered: the continued importance of the fishery and the idealized social image of outport Newfoundlanders as a "tough race"; the expectation that women should endure hardship and solve problems rather than create them; and the strict enforcement of an egalitarian ethic throughout the community.