Staying healthy in immigrant Pakistani families living in the United States.

Purpose: To determine the meaning of "staying healthy" as experienced by immigrant Pakistani families living in the United States.

Design: Phenomenological, interpretive using a convenience, purposive sample, in 1994, of members of four Pakistani immigrant families in one Midwestern U.S. city.

Method: Heideggerian interpretive analysis applied to verbatim Urdu translated to English text by four researchers.

Findings: The relational themes found were: feeling understood, maintaining spiritual peace, keeping family and neighbor support, longing for the former way of being, and knowing how. Achieving wholeness was found to be the constitutive pattern. Participants viewed health as a dynamic experience of "being on the right path".

Conclusions: Acceptance of care interventions depends on congruence with one's sense of what is "right"--spiritually as well as physically. Viewing health and illness as unitary and planning care once the meaning people assign to health and illness is clearly understood is important for clinical practice.