Prior research has identified that older adults with Parkinson’s disease experience both personal and social difficulties due to the interactions between environmental factors (e.g. social attitudes about impairments) and their physical and cognitive challenges of their condition. My thesis explored how older adults with Parkinson’s disease negotiated their contexts of personal and social identity post-diagnosis. Using a constructivist, narrative approach, I aimed to understand what personal and social factors contributed to how people with Parkinson’s disease maintain, negotiate, and adapt their identity within the private sphere of the home and the broader community. For all five participants, three sessions took place, including two in-depth interviews, in order to gain as much insight and detail as possible into each participant’s story, ideas, and opinions about negotiating their identity with Parkinson’s disease. From this data, four major themes emerged including: Negotiating identity while managing Parkinson’s disease, Acceptance as a process, Resisting a disabled identity, andThe centrality of occupations and roles. From this research, greater understanding and awareness can be raised for the hardships impacting the identities of those with Parkinson’s disease, such as stigmatizations and physical and cognitive limitations leading to loss of occupations, to encourage further attention and expansion of community engagement and activities for these individuals
