Illness narratives and chronic patients' sustainable employability: The impact of positive work stories.

ABSTRACT: The number of workers with a chronic disease is steadily growing in industrialized countries. To cope with and to give meaning to their illness, patients construct illness narratives, which are widely shared across patient societies, personal networks and the media. This study investigates the influence of these shared illness narratives on patient's working lives, by examining the impact of reading a positive work story versus negative work story on patients' sustainable employability. We expected that this relationship would be mediated by positive emotions and the extent to which the story enhanced awareness of desires future selves, and moderated by identification with story character. An online field experiment with 166 people with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in The Netherlands showed

SUBMITTER: Brokerhof IM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7010250 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature