Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, Vol. 13, No. 3, September 2003 ( C  2003) The Narratives of 12 Men With AIDS: Exploring Return to Work Brent Braveman, 1,3 Christine Helfrich, 1 Gary Kielhofner, 1 and Gary Albrecht 2 Analyses of life stories has increasingly been used to understand how different individuals interpret and respond to an experience such as the onset of disability. This paper presents findings of a prospective qualitative study of 12 men living with AIDS who attempted to return to paid employment. Narrative analysis of four interviews over 12 months was used to explore the relationship between return-to-work efforts and whether participants’ narratives progressed, remained stable, or regressed. Findings suggest that the men who demonstrated progressive narratives recreated an identity including a view of themselves as workers and recaptured a sense of competence. Men with regressive narratives demonstrated decreased identity and competence while men with stable narratives showed little change in either identity or competence. This paper contributes to our understanding of how the framing of an illness or disability by an individual may influence the progression of his life history narrative. KEY WORDS: narrative; AIDS; identity; competence; vocational rehabilitation. INTRODUCTION Numerous studies have discussed attempts by individuals to create change in their lives by returning to employment after the onset of injury or disability (1–6). These studies have often sought to identify through predictive modeling the physical, psychological, or environmental factors that may influence the outcome of these efforts. While studies have been helpful in identifying factors in a cohort of participants that may influence success in return to work, such studies are of more limited utility in understanding how a given individual makes decisions related to return to work. An alternative approach to understanding why and how individuals achieve or fail to achieve desired change (e.g., return to work) is to examine how individuals create and enact personal narratives (stories) (7). In the current study, narratives were gathered over 1 year via a series of four interviews with 12 men with AIDS who were attempting to return to paid employment following 1 Department of Occupational Therapy, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 2 School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 3 Correspondence should be directed to Brent Braveman, Department of Occupational Therapy, University of Illinois at Chicago, M/C 811, 1919 W. Taylor Street, Chicago, Illinois 60612; e-mail: bbravema@uic.edu. 143 1053-0487/03/0900-0143/0 C  2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation