The University of Liverpool’s Centre for Ageing and the Life Course has received a £320k research grant from the Medical Research Council (MRC) for a £409.9k project to investigate the medical, social, and cultural dimensions of minority ethnic women’s experience of menopause. The research will provide guidance to aid health care interventions targeted at both menopause and later in the life course.
Call for participants
Are you a Black or Chinese women, aged over 40, and think you have experienced menopause? We would like to hear about your experiences.
We're seeking participants from the Liverpool area to take part in an interview to inform our research. Your participation will help us understand the minority ethnic women's experience of menopause, in order to improve health care intervention targeted at both menopause and later in the life course.
Eligibility
- Women from Black or Chinese communities living in Liverpool
- Aged between 40 to 60 years old
- Experienced perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms
- Speaks English, Cantonese and/or Mandarin
Activities
- A one-to-one interview, at a time and venue convenient and comfortable to you. You will fill in a questionnaire and tell us your experiences about menopause and your life history.
- If you are interested, we will invite you to a workshop to create stories using creative methods together. The stories will be used for a public exhibition.
For more information, or to participate, please contact our research team. You will receive a £20 voucher for your participation in the study.
Dr Susan Waigwa
Email: susan.waigwa@liverpool.ac.uk
Phone: 07767077115
Ms Tina Chow (Speaks Cantonese and Mandarin)
Email: ting.chow@liverpool.ac.uk
Phone: 07767082446
Download the Call for Participants - Menopause and Ethnicity Recruitment Poster (PDF)
Rationale
Very little is currently known about the menopause experience of women from diverse ethnic communities living in the UK, including their perceptions of, and interaction with, health care providers. The limited existing research on this subject suggests that barriers and obstacles to health care need exploring, both from the perspective of women, and from that of their health care providers.
Drawing on the insights of previous sociological research and informed by the need to reduce the health gap between white and minority ethnic communities, which grows wider with age, this research project takes a culturally informed approach to the menopause.
The two-year interdisciplinary research project, led by Professor Susan Pickard, Head of the Department of Sociology, Social Policy, and Criminology, and Director of the Centre for Ageing and the Life Course, will run from September 2023 – August 2025. It will focus on the lived experiences of menopause for two groups of minority ethnic women, to map the heterogeneity both within and between ethnicities, with reference to biographical life course factors, including socio-demographics, migration history, employment, and reproductive history to investigate the impact of these factors on menopausal experience.
This project also seeks to explore the approaches of consultants, GPs, and other health care practitioners to support ethnically diverse women through the menopause transition, identifying both barriers and facilitators to support interactions.
The core research team for the project will be led by Susan Pickard as Principal Investigator, and includes Dr Elham Amini, Dr Susan Waigwa, and Ting (Tina) Chow from the University of Liverpool, Dr Lynn Tang, Royal Holloway, University of London, Dr Jane Wilkinson from Liverpool Women's Hospital, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and Dr Paula Elizabeth Briggs from Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and Chair of the British Menopause Society, as Co-Investigators.
They bring collective experience in the life course, cultural gerontology, medical sociology, lived experience and service users’ perspectives, inequalities and related policies, menopause, mental health, and sexual and reproductive health.
Back to: Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology