GENDER DIFFERENCES IN COPING WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF DIABETES: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM INDIA

India is second larget home not only to the world’s population but also to diabetic patients. Such ‘overlapping health & demographic transition’, with non-communicable diseases as leading cause of mortality and morbidity in a country burdened with communicable diseases has altered the socioeconomic gradient in the prevalence of diabetes significantly with greater concentration of risk factors among the poor. Therefore public health policies need to diverge from a typical ‘lifestyle’ related explications of diabetes and must examine the coping with diabetes in a broader ‘social determinants’ perspective. Coping strategies are often based on cognitive, emotional and action-oriented efforts linked to diabetes involving lifestyle modifications and harm reduction. Unlike other chronic diseases, that have medium valence, lower controllability via medical intervention, Diabetes have high changeability and low ambiguity thus enough room for problem-oriented forms of coping. However, many studies have highlighted that contextual factors such as sociocultural environment have crucial bearing and explains differentials in coping among men and women. Thus this paper engages with the social determinants in health framework to analyze the influence of social and material deprivation (or abundance) that is associated with coping of diabetes.