Sharing Medicine: The Candidacy of Medicines and Other Household Items for Sharing, Dominican Republic

Abstract

BackgroundPeople share medicines and problems can result from this behavior. Successful interventions to change sharing behavior will require understanding people’s motives and purposes for sharing medicines. Better information about how medicines fit into the gifting and reciprocity system could be useful in designing interventions to modify medicine sharing behavior. However, it is uncertain how people situate medicines among other items that might be shared. This investigation is a descriptive study of how people sort medicines and other shareable items.Methods and FindingsThis study in the Dominican Republic examined how a convenience sample (31 people) sorted medicines and rated their shareability in relation to other common household items. We used non-metric multidimensional scaling to produce association maps in which the distances between items offer a visual representation of the collective opinion of the participants regarding the relationships among the items. In addition, from a pile sort constrained by four categories of whether sharing or loaning the item was acceptable (on a scale from not shareable to very shareable), we assessed the degree to which the participants rated the medicines as shareable compared to other items. Participants consistently grouped medicines together in all pile sort activities; yet, medicines were mixed with other items when rated by their candidacy to be shared. Compared to the other items, participants had more variability of opinion as to whether medicines should be shared.ConclusionsPeople think of medicines as a distinct group, suggesting that interventions might be designed to apply to medicines as a group. People’s differing opinions as to whether it was appropriate to share medicines imply a degree of uncertainty or ambiguity that health promotion interventions might exploit to alter attitudes and behaviors. These findings have implications for the design of health promotion interventions to impact medicine sharing behavior.

A qualitative exploration of healthcare providers’ perspectives on patients’ non‐recreational, prescription medicines sharing behaviours

“…Generally, medicine sharing among patients has been described as a means of expressing a caring relationship or providing social support for loved ones during illness 16,30 or when medicines are unavailable. 20 In accordance with previous research, 19 participants in this study noted that their patients did not always disclose sharing practices. There are several potential reasons for this including patients not being asked directly by healthcare providers about their sharing practices, and being aware that it is a behaviour discouraged by healthcare providers.…”

“…Participants also discussed altruistic reasons for sharing medicines, a finding reported by others where medicine lending and borrowing practices were seen by patients as ‘a way of looking out for each other’, particularly when one cannot afford the cost of medicines or a visit to the doctor. Generally, medicine sharing among patients has been described as a means of expressing a caring relationship or providing social support for loved ones during illness or when medicines are unavailable …”

Sanitation, Stress, and Life Stage: A Systematic Data Collection Study among Women in Odisha, India

“…We selected systematic data collection methods–a broad family of interviewing techniques originally intended to examine tacit knowledge in ethnography and cognitive anthropology–for use in this study [ 16 ]. These methods have been used to explore the boundaries and dimensions of specific cognitive domains that may be culturally defined or difficult to articulate, such as kinship terms [ 17 ] or medicinal classifications [ 18 , 19 ], and the internal systems of classification that individuals employ. Unlike open-ended interviewing or participant observations, systematic methods entail asking all respondents the same questions and analyzing responses according to emic categorization rather than those imposed by the researcher.…”

Prescription medicine sharing: exploring patients’ beliefs and experiences

“…This approach may not provide a complete picture of sharing. People’s decisions to share medicines might not differ from their decision to share other commodities, [ 31 ] and understanding the ‘social context’ of medicines could provide further insights into why people share medicines.…”

“…The majority of the evidence around adults’ medicine sharing practices has been from cross-sectional surveys; limited qualitative studies are available describing non-recreational medicine sharing behaviours among adults [ 12 ]. A recent, extensive literature search by the research team has revealed only two qualitative studies that were specifically designed to assess medicine sharing behaviours [ 11 , 31 ]. One of these studies explored older adults’ sharing behaviours, [ 11 ] and the other was designed to determine people’s willingness to share medicines in comparison with other sharable commodities and, as such did not provide details about sharing behaviours [ 31 ].…”