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Caring labour, intersectionality and worker satisfaction: an analysis of the National Nursing Assistant Study (NNAS)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Caring labour in long-term care settings is increasingly important as the US population ages. Ethnographic research on nursing assistants (NAs) portrays nursing home care as routine and fast paced in facilities that emphasise life maintenance more than care. Recent interview-based and small quantitative studies describe a mix of positive and negative aspects of NA work, including the rewards of caring, despite shortcomings in working conditions and pay. The current study continues this research but, for the first time, using national data. The 2004 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Nursing Assistant Stu...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - November 5, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Carter C. Rakovski, Kim Price-Glynn Source Type: journals

The need to act a little more 'scientific': biomedical researchers investigating complementary and alternative medicineEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study uses qualitative interviews to explore how CAM researchers perceive and negotiate challenges inherent in their work. Our analysis considers eight NIH-funded CAM researchers': (1) personal engagement with CAM, (2) social reactions towards perceived suspiciousness of research colleagues and (3) strategic methodological efforts to counteract perceived biases encountered during the peer review process. In response to peer suspicion, interviews showed CAM researchers adjusting their self-presentation style, highlighting their proximity to science, and carefully 'self-censoring' or reframing their unconventional belie...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - November 4, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Ginger Polich, Christopher Dole, Ted J. Kaptchuk Source Type: journals

Stem cells clinical trials for cardiac repair: regulation as practical accomplishmentEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Macro-analyses on the regulation of new biomedical objects tend to focus on discursive structures and legislative categories in science policy debates at national and cross-national levels, but overlook how actors engage in regulatory practices on an everyday basis. Based on data from ethnographic fieldwork in British and German clinics, and 32 interviews with medical staff, this article provides an insight into the regulation of adult stem cell research and its clinical implementation. The argument illustrates the enactment of regulation at different stages and highlights the accompanying interpretative strategies employe...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - November 4, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Dana M. Wilson-Kovacs, Susanne Weber, Christine Hauskeller Source Type: journals

Compliance and concordance during domiciliary medication review involving pharmacists and older peopleEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Medication review is an advanced service registered pharmacists can now offer patients in the UK. This in-depth study of pharmacist-older patient communication during domiciliary medication review encounters examines how the interactions are constructed by participants and the influence of the compliance paradigm on the interaction. Twenty-nine observed, taped and transcribed consultations were analysed using discourse analysis. Ethnographic-style interviews in the field with pharmacists, follow-up interviews with patients and feedback workshops with pharmacists allowed interpretations to be tested and strengthened. The fi...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - November 4, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Charlotte Salter Source Type: journals

Interrogating the dynamics between power, knowledge and pregnant bodies in amniocentesis decision makingEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A common assumption is that women who decline prenatal testing distrust biomedicine and trust embodied/experiential knowledge sources, while women who accept testing trust biomedicine and distrust embodied/experiential sources. Another major assumption about prenatal testing utilisation is that women who are open to abortion will undergo prenatal testing while those who are opposed to abortion will decline testing. Yet, previous research has produced inconsistent findings as to what, if anything, distinguishes women who accept or decline the offer of prenatal diagnosis. Analysing interviews with 147 pregnant women, this pa...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - November 4, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Susan Markens, Carole H. Browner, H. Mabel Preloran Source Type: journals

Cancer survivorship, mor(t)ality and lifestyle discourses on cancer preventionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Despite ongoing controversies regarding the impact of lifestyle factors such as body weight, diet and exercise on health, this framework has become increasingly prominent in understandings of cancer aetiology. To date, little consideration has been given to the impacts of such discourses on people with a history of cancer. Drawing on an ethnographic study of cancer survivors, I explore the constitutive dimensions of these discourses and the ways that they shape the subjectivities of women and men with a history of the disease. Overall, the study participants evidenced a complex and ambivalent engagement with such discourse...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - November 4, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Kirsten Bell Source Type: journals

Genetic risks and healthy choices: creating citizen-consumers of genetic services through empowerment and facilitationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Genetic testing to identify susceptibility to a variety of common complex diseases is increasingly becoming available. In this article, focusing on the development of genetic susceptibility testing for diet-related disease, I examine the emergence of direct-to-the-consumer genetic testing services and the (re)configuration of healthcare provision, both within and outside the specialist genetics service, in the UK. I identify two key techniques within these practices: empowerment and facilitation. Using Foucauldian social theory, I show that empowerment and facilitation are being positioned as tools for the creation of citi...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - November 4, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Alison Harvey Source Type: journals

The case of the vanishing patient? Image and experienceEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It has been argued that the new technologies of medicine privilege the image over the actual body and its experience, so that the patients themselves may 'vanish' behind the images. A case study is used to explore this from the patient's point of view. What evidence is there that alienation or other dysfunctional effects can actually happen? In this example of the high-tech medicine of lung cancer treatment, it was demonstrable that the process of diagnosis was not only dependent on, but also in some ways distorted by, the reliance on technologies. It was not necessarily true, however, that the machines and the images them...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 29, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Mildred Blaxter Source Type: journals

Understanding adolescent mental health: the influence of social processes, doing gender and gendered power relationsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Despite a well-documented gender pattern in adolescent mental health, research investigating possible explanatory factors from a gender-theoretical approach is scarce. This paper reports a grounded theory study based on 29 focus groups. The aim was to explore 16- to 19-year-old students' perceptions of what is significant for mental health, and to apply a gender analysis to the findings in order to advance understanding of the gender pattern in adolescent mental health. Significant factors were identified in three social processes categories, including both positive and negative aspects: (1) social interactions, (2) perfor...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 28, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Evelina Landstedt, Kenneth Asplund, Katja Gillander Gådin Source Type: journals

Troubling biographical disruption: narratives of unconcern about hepatitis C diagnosisEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper explores the impact of hepatitis C diagnosis among participants of a recent qualitative study based in New Zealand and Australia. The findings of this research were unique with regard to the small amount of existing literature on the topic. Whilst most social research indicates that diagnosis with hepatitis C is a disruptive or distressing experience, study participants were almost evenly divided between those who reported being distressed by diagnosis and those who described contracting hepatitis C as 'no big deal'. The varied nature of participants' narratives about their hepatitis C diagnosis indicates that t...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 28, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Magdalena Harris Source Type: journals

Bridging a gap: the (lack of a) sociology of oral health and healthcareEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article provides an historical review of international research related to sociology and oral health and healthcare. I begin by considering the relevance of the mouth and oral health to social interactions and physical health, and outline existing inequalities in oral health and healthcare experiences. The paper examines critically some of the existing published research in the field [ndash] considering both what might be described as sociology of oral health and healthcare and sociology in oral healthcare [ndash] and demonstrates the dearth of sociological research related to this subject compared to other areas of i...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 28, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Catherine Exley Source Type: journals

Exploring stigma: medical knowledge and the stigmatisation of parents of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorderEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper analyses 12 parent interviews to investigate the stigmatisation of parents of children diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Drawing on poststructural accounts of the relationship between knowledge and subjectivity, the stigma concept is critically interrogated in order to address previous individualistic constructions of stigmatisation and to place stigma within the power dynamics of social control. The results of the study indicate that a child's diagnosis with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is critical for parents to resist stigmatisation. Parents experienced considerable enacted stigma, but successf...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 28, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: David Farrugia Source Type: journals

Biographical disruption, abruption and repair in the context of Motor Neurone DiseaseEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Concepts of biographical disruption and repair have been widely applied to chronic illness, but not terminal illness. This paper examines the relevance of these concepts to motor neurone disease (MND), a progressive neurological condition characterised by loss of mobility, speech and ability to breathe or swallow. Survival is usually between two and five years, and some die within a few months. The condition thus lies at the boundary between chronic and terminal illness. Narrative interviews were conducted with 35 people living with MND and 11 family carers; analysis explored how people constructed their accounts as well a...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 28, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Louise Locock, Sue Ziebland, Carol Dumelow Source Type: journals

Who rules rare disease associations? A framework to understand their actionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The inner structure of so-called 'patients' organisations' has been accorded relatively little attention with respect to their increasing role in the medical world. This comparative study in France of eight such organisations, matching six rare disorders, explores the issue of power and decision making through the description of the entities that make up the organisation (and especially which stakeholders are represented), their mutual relationships, the temporal scope of collective action, and the concrete achievements of the organisation. Two main types of organisation are distinguished: 'pluralistic' organisations (that...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 9, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Caroline Huyard Source Type: journals

What happens along the diagnostic pathway to CHD treatment? Qualitative results concerning cognitive processesEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Extensive research on health disparities documents persistent differential diagnosis and treatment of many conditions according to patient characteristics, physician attributes, and healthcare systems. Less is known about how physicians arrive at their decisions. We use qualitative data from a vignette-based factorial experiment to examine how physicians reason through and account for their clinical decisions, and how variations arise despite the presentation of identical symptoms of coronary heart disease (CHD). We find that physicians show evidence of cognitive biases but also actively interpret social characteristics th...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 8, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Karen E. Lutfey, John B. McKinlay Source Type: journals

Boundary setting in breast cancer research: a study of the experience of women volunteer research subjectsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Drawing on a research collaboration between a group of medical physicists and social scientists, this paper aims to explore female volunteers' experiences of participating in a project for developing a new breast disease diagnostic technology using an optical imaging system. In order to understand how these women make sense of being a volunteer, we examine the complexities of their experiences in this type of research setting through an empirically-based study involving participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the volunteers. Traditionally, volunteers are constructed as passive research material. In cont...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 8, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Victoria Armstrong, Norma Morris Source Type: journals

Managing biomedical uncertainty: the technoscientific illness identityEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper analyses how the biomedical uncertainty of breast cancer contributes to the development of a new type of illness identity that is grounded in biomedical knowledge, advanced technology, and biomedical health and risk surveillance. The technoscientific identity (TSI) develops through the application of sciences and technologies to one's sense of self. Analysing narrative data from 60 in-depth interviews with women diagnosed with breast cancer, this research demonstrates how women diagnosed with breast cancer develop and maintain TSIs through four processes: (1) immersion in professional biomedical knowledge, (2) l...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - July 8, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Gayle A. Sulik Source Type: journals

Older women and suntanning: the negotiation of health and appearance risksEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper examines older women's experiences and perceptions of sunbathing, sun avoidance, and suntanned appearances. Using data from in-depth interviews with 36 women aged 71 to 94, we elucidate the motivations behind the women's sunbathing practices. Specifically, we explore how the women responded to the health and appearance risks associated with exposure to and avoidance of ultraviolet radiation as well as extant feminine beauty norms. The majority of women put their experiences of sunbathing in an emergent historical context. Although most of the women suggested that suntanned appearances were indicative of health a...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - June 9, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Laura Hurd Clarke, Alexandra Korotchenko Source Type: journals

The moral regulation of the workplace: presenteeism and public healthEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper draws on Durkheimian concepts of moral forces, particularly anomie and fatalism, and the forced division of labour, to argue that the current institutional arrangements to protect and compensate workers in hazardous workplaces are insufficient. This argument is illustrated with interview data from workers at a meatworks in New Zealand which examined workers' responses to illness and injury in the workplace. It is suggested that an imbalance in moral forces leads to pathological outcomes for workers [ndash] seen in presenteeism [ndash] the phenomenon of staying at work when injured or ill [ndash] and workplace in...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - June 8, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Kevin Dew, Trina Taupo Source Type: journals

Fear, fascination and the sperm donor as 'abjection' in interviews with heterosexual recipients of donor inseminationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In conclusion I argue that anonymisation preserves features of conventional family life, maintains the idea of exclusivity within the heterosexual relationship and affirms the legal father's insecurity about his infertility. (Source: Sociology of Health and Illness)
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - May 15, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Jennifer Burr Source Type: journals

Survival and its discontents: the case of British psychiatryEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article considers this general picture but in specific relation to mental health work in Britain and its particular features of recent contestation. British psychiatric orthodoxy has faced challenges to its legitimacy for over a century. However, since the 1980s, in the wake of de-institutionalisation and a new shared service commitment to 'recovery', these challenges have taken new shape. They are explored by considering: the current ambit of mental health care; the sub-division of labour in specialist mental services; recent governmental expectations of the mental health workforce; and the contested legacy of theory...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - April 18, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: David Pilgrim, Anne Rogers Source Type: journals

Tacit knowledge of caring and embodied selfhoodEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The tacit knowledge paradigm is gaining recognition as an important source of knowledge that informs clinical decision-making. It is, however, limited by an exclusive focus on knowledge acquired through clinical practice, and a consequent neglect of the primordial and socio-cultural significance of embodied selfhood, precisely what provides the foundational structure of tacit knowledge of caring and facilitates its manifestation. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study of 43 dementia care practitioners in Ontario, Canada that utilised research-based drama and focus group methodology, we argue that embodied selfhood is...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - April 16, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Pia C. Kontos, Gary Naglie Source Type: journals

Understanding the social patterning of smoking practices: a dynamic typologyEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In many countries, cigarette consumption has been on a declining trend for over 20 years. However, different patterns of smoking practices have emerged. Our goal is to explore how the patterning of smoking practices occurs and persists over time, and to investigate the factors that could help interpret these patterns. Data were derived from the National Population Health Surveys and comprise a large representative sample of the population. Dynamic Typology methods reveal two main classes of typology: monothetic groups with stable patterns of behaviour over time (never-smokers, chronically addicted smokers, long-term ex-smo...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - April 16, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Marie-Rachelle Narcisse, Nicole Dedobbeleer, Andre-Pierre Contandriopoulos, Antonio Ciampi Source Type: journals

The 'actualities' of knowledge work: an institutional ethnography of multi-disciplinary primary health care teamsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study is set against the backdrop of the evolving order of a health care system in a province implementing a set of concurrent reforms. The study investigates how 'knowledge work' of multi-disciplinary health care teams is actually done and how it is co-ordinated across sites. Knowledge work involves three processes: the creation of new knowledge during the transfer of knowledge, in the context of the application of knowledge to their collective clinical decision-making. Institutional ethnography is used to explore the social and institutional forces that shape the knowledge work of health care providers in and across...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - April 10, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Elizabeth Quinlan Source Type: journals

Medicine and management in a comparative perspective: the case of Denmark and EnglandEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In health systems around the world the current trend has been for doctors to increase their participation in management. This has been taken to imply a common process of re-stratification with new divisions emerging between medical elites and the rank and file. However, our understanding of this change remains limited and it is open to question just how far one can generalise. In this paper we investigate this matter drawing on path dependency theory and ideas from the sociology of professions. Focusing on public management reforms in the hospital sectors of two European countries [ndash] Denmark and England [ndash] we not...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - April 9, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Ian Kirkpatrick, Peter Kragh Jespersen, Mike Dent, Indareth Neogy Source Type: journals

Market reforms in English primary medical care: medicine, habitus and the public sphereEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Drawing on interviews with English primary care doctors (GPs), this paper examines GP responses to reforms intended to introduce a market in primary health care. GPs' reactions are conceptualised in terms of a GP habitus, which takes for granted the superiority of 'public' providers (i.e. GP partnerships) in the provision of care. GPs are actively involved in the defence of the public sphere, which is neither a neo-liberal minimalist market state, nor a wholly altruistic state, responding to consumers' wants. The public sphere they defend is one in which boundaries are drawn about entitlements and GPs are actively engaged ...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - April 9, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Ruth McDonald Source Type: journals

Derivative benefits: exploring the body through complementary and alternative medicineEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Since the 1960s, in Western societies, there has been a striking growth of consumer interest in complementary or alternative medicine (CAM). In order to make this increased popularity intelligible this paper challenges stereotypical images of users' motives and the results of clinical studies of CAM by exploring bodily experiences of acupuncture, reflexology treatments, and mindfulness training. The study draws on 138 in-depth interviews with 46 clients, client diaries and observations of 92 clinical treatments in order to identify bodily experiences of health and care: experiences that are contested between forces of mast...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - April 9, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Charlotte Baarts, Inge Kryger Pedersen Source Type: journals

Functions of health fatalism: fatalistic talk as face saving, uncertainty management, stress relief and sense makingEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study analyses 96 in-depth lay interviews in the US, most with low-income members of the general public, about four diseases: heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes and depression. Within these interviews, fatalistic statements always occurred alongside statements endorsing the utility of behaviours for protecting health. This usage pattern suggests that these statements may have useful functions, rather than being simply a repudiation of the utility of health choices. We examine four functions that are suggested by previous researchers or by the participants' comments: stress relief, uncertainty management, sense makin...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - April 9, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Bethany Keeley, Lanelle Wright, Celeste M. Condit Source Type: journals

Eugenic utopias/dystopias, reprogenetics, and community geneticsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The impetus for this review is the intriguing realisation that eugenics, viewed as dystopian and authoritarian in most of the 20th century, is in the process of being reinterpreted today [ndash] in the context of reproductive genetics [ndash] as utopian and liberal. This review offers an analytical framework for mapping the growing literature on this subject in order to provide a summary for both teaching and research in medical sociology. Recent works are subsumed and explored in three areas: historical criticism of the 'old eugenics'; the continuation of this stream in the form of criticism of reprogenetics as a new, 'ba...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - March 30, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Aviad E. Raz Source Type: journals

Securitising health: Australian newspaper coverage of pandemic influenzaEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper analyses contemporary Australian newspaper coverage of the threat of pandemic influenza in humans, specifically in the light of recent transformations in biomedical and public health understandings of infectious disease as continuously emerging. Our analysis suggests that the spectre of pandemic influenza is characterised, in newspaper accounts, as invoking a specific form of nation building. The Australian nation is depicted as successfully securing itself in the face of a threat from Asia (and in the absence of an effective international health body). What is described in newspaper accounts reflects a shift in...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - March 30, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Niamh Stephenson, Michelle Jamieson Source Type: journals

How did uncommon disorders become 'rare diseases'? History of a boundary objectEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The category of 'rare diseases' has been in growing use in the fields of public health and patient advocacy for the past 15 years in Europe. In this socio-historical inquiry, I argue that this category, which appeared initially as a by-product of the orphan drug issue in the United States of America is a boundary object. As such, it has different specific local uses: a meaningless category for physicians, it relates to the patients' experience of illness, whereas the pharmaceutical industry first considered it as being synonymous with small markets and then with innovation. Public bodies contributed to framing a common and...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - March 30, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Caroline Huyard Source Type: journals

Everyday health and the internet: a mediated health perspective on health information seekingEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper explores the relationship between internet use and individuals' health experience. Adopting a 'mediated health' approach, it presents four cases studies of households using the internet for health information. The study shows that participants use the internet as it offers personalised information in line with individuals' and families' health needs affecting their everyday routines. The internet emerges as an everyday helper linked to the intimacy of health experiences. Agency is manifest in study participants' choice of both becoming more informed as well as having the possibility of ignoring information. Case...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - February 13, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Joëlle Kivits Source Type: journals

Bridging gaps in risk discourse: home care case management and client choicesEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper examines, and problematises, a well-entrenched conceptualisation of how home care case management practice works [ndash] that is, that case managers offer alternatives, and clients make choices. This understanding of practice is reinforced by organisational policy that states that clients have the right to live at risk if that is their choice. Analysis of data from a field study of home care practice in a western Canadian city, drawing predominantly on case managers' accounts of actual practice situations, underscores the limitations of such a view, and suggests that conceptualising such practices as ongoing and...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - February 11, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Christine Ceci, Mary Ellen Purkis Source Type: journals

Food and eating as social practice – understanding eating patterns as social phenomena and implications for public healthEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Globally, public health agencies recognise obesity trends among populations as a priority. Explanations for population obesity patterns are linked to obesogenic environments and societal trends which encourage patterns of overeating and little physical activity. However, obesity prevention and nutrition intervention focus predominantly on changing individual level eating behaviours. Disappointingly, behaviour-based nutrition education approaches to changing population eating patterns have met with limited success. Sociological perspectives propose that underlying social relations can help explain collective food and eating...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - February 11, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Treena Delormier, Katherine L. Frohlich, Louise Potvin Source Type: journals

Sociology of diagnosis: a preliminary reviewEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Diagnoses are the classification tools of medicine, and are pivotal in the ways medicine exerts its role in society. Their sociological study is commonly subsumed under the rubrics of medicalisation, history of medicine and theory of disease. Diagnosis is, however, a powerful social tool, with unique features and impacts which deserve their own specific analysis. The process of diagnosis provides the framework within which medicine operates, punctuates the values which medicine espouses, and underlines the authoritative role of both medicine and the doctor. Diagnosis takes place at a salient juncture between illness and di...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - February 11, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Annemarie Jutel Source Type: journals

Economic inequality and population health: looking beyond aggregate indicatorsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper studies the sensitivity of various health indicators to income inequality as measured by regional Gini coefficients, using individual microdata from Finland over the period 1993[ndash]2005. There is no overall association between income and health at the regional level. We discovered that, among men, there are no significant associations between income inequality and several measures of health status. Among women or among both sexes combined, there are some indications of associations in the predicted direction between income inequality and physical health, disability retirement, sick leave, and consumption of m...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - February 11, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Petri Böckerman, Edvard Johansson, Satu Helakorpi, Antti Uutela Source Type: journals

'So forget how old I am!' Examining age identities in the face of chronic conditionsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examines the construction of age identity among older people with chronic conditions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 45 participants from two senior centres. Applying symbolic interactionism and the concept of stigma to participants' narratives, we identified three categories of age identities: definitely old; definitely not old; and ambivalent about their age identity. Further, we examined the metaphors of agelessness and the mask of ageing, the relationship between chronological age and age identity as well as the age-related stereotypes that older people offered in their narratives of their ex...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - February 11, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Philip A. Rozario, Daniel Derienzis Source Type: journals

Smoke-free air policy: subcultural shifts and secondary health effects among club-going young adultsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In March 2003, New York City implemented legislation that called for a ban of smoking in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and other establishments. The express purpose of this legislation was to protect the health of employees and patrons from second-hand smoke. In addition to the stated goal of protection from second-hand smoke for employees, key secondary health effects of this law have emerged in the lives of club-going youth. This paper is based upon data derived from an ethnographic research project on club-related health issues in NYC. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork during the implementation of the ban and in-dept...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - February 11, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Brian C. Kelly Source Type: journals

'Futureless persons': shifting life expectancies and the vicissitudes of progressive illnessEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Medical technological advances can have profound effects on people's lives by extending the life course and creating uncertain futures. This is the case for a number of persons with 'diseases of childhood' who can now survive well into adulthood with technological support. This paper draws on a Canadian qualitative study of young men with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) which examined the effects of a shifting life expectancy on personal identities. Engaging with Pierre Bourdieu's central concept of habitus, we discuss the temporal dimensions of social exclusion and marginalised identities. Participants' narrative accoun...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - February 11, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Barbara E. Gibson, Hilde Zitzelsberger, Patricia McKeever Source Type: journals

Circulating beliefs, resilient metaphors and faith in biomedicine: hepatitis C patients and interferon combination therapyEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this paper, we argue that circulating metaphors and beliefs can create an environment in which particular biomedical treatments make cultural sense, even if they seem to be ineffective or are associated with unpleasant side effects. We develop this argument in relation to interferon combined therapy. An innovative methodology combining the collection and deconstructive analysis of visual and narrative texts produced by people with hepatitis C is used to demonstrate links between a predisposition towards Western biomedical practice, discomfort with uncertainty, a desire to reassert control, and adoption of conflict metap...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - January 26, 2009 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Anton Jenner, Anne Scott Source Type: journals

Status incongruence revisited: associations with shame and mental wellbeingEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Status incongruence has been related to poor health and all-cause mortality, and could be a growing public health problem due to changes in the labour market in later decades. Shaming experiences have been suggested as playing a part in the aetiology. The aim here was to study the risk for shaming experiences, pessimism, anxiety, depressive feelings, and poor mental wellbeing (as measured by the GHQ) with a special focus on shame, in four social status categories: negatively and positively incongruent individuals, and low-status and high-status congruent individuals. Data comprised 14,854 working men and women from a regio...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 22, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Johanna Lundberg, Margareta Kristenson, Bengt Starrin Source Type: journals

Physical and digital proximity: emerging ways of health care in face-to-face and telemonitoring of heart-failure patientsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The introduction of telehealth-care technologies profoundly changes existing practices of care. This paper aims to enhance our understanding of these changes by providing a comparative study of health-care services for heart-failure patients based on face-to-face contacts in a policlinic (department of a health care facility treating outpatients) and remote consultations at a telehealth-care centre. I will show how changes that take place when care moves from physical to virtual clinical encounters cannot be understood in terms of a replication of existing health-care services. Instead, it is more useful to conceptualise t...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 19, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Nelly Oudshoorn Source Type: journals

Indeterminacy and technicality revisited: how medicine and nursing have responded to the evidence based movementEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In 1970 sociologists Jamous and Peloille proposed that occupational work could be understood as a combination of technical activity and indeterminate judgement and that the professions were characterised by high levels of indeterminacy relative to technicality. They argued that groups with low status or on the fringes of powerful professional groups were more likely to promote technically based reform, whereas elites were likely to resist with assertions of indeterminacy. Subsequent writers claimed that their notion of the indeterminacy/technicality ratio was more useful in analysis of professional ideology than in examina...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 19, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Michael Traynor Source Type: journals

'Post antibiotic apocalypse': discourses of mutation in narratives of MRSAEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this paper we will consider the question of mutation as it is manifested in press coverage of MRSA in UK hospitals. This represents a fertile field of discourse which brings into focus issues relating to microbes, people and working practices as well as the concepts of risk and vulnerability. A regular feature of reporting has been the presence of explanations for drug resistance involving repeated random mutations of the microbe to achieve progressively greater resistance and versatility, largely through a Darwinian process which is 'clever' at overcoming human attempts at elimination. More recently a discourse has eme...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 19, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Brian Brown, Paul Crawford Source Type: journals

Choosing not to choose: reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairmentsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article reports the results of a qualitative study of parents whose children are clients of a state-wide rural genetic outreach programme in the US. The analysis seeks to connect the lived experience of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments to choices with which women are confronted as prenatal testing technologies continue to proliferate. It reports the finding that a majority of parents in the study chose not to choose: avoiding future pregnancies, declining prenatal testing for subsequent pregnancies, or limiting testing to 'for information only'. These decisions do not reflect simple rejection...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 17, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Susan E. Kelly Source Type: journals

Violence, dignity and HIV vulnerability: street sex work in SerbiaEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Sex work can be contextualised by violence, social and material inequality, and HIV vulnerability. We undertook a qualitative study to explore female and transvestite sex workers' accounts (n = 31) of HIV risk environment in Belgrade and Pančevo, Serbia. Violence emerged as a key theme. Accounts emphasise the ubiquity of multiple forms of everyday violence [ndash] physical, emotional, social [ndash] in street sex work scenes, linked to police as much as clients. We highlight the salience of emotions in sex work risk management, in which the preservation of dignity is of prime importance. Accounts draw upon narrative...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 17, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Milena Simić, Tim Rhodes Source Type: journals

From housing wealth to well-being?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The positive health effects of owner-occupation, compared to renting, are well documented. But home ownership is itself heterogeneous, as is the health profile of its incumbents, and this is less well recognised. Drawing from a mixed-methods study, which includes 150 qualitative interviews with a cross-section of UK mortgage holders, this paper examines the health implications of a definitive feature of owned housing: its role as a financial tool. In particular, we ask whether there is anything about the process of accumulating wealth into housing or spending from this resource, that enhances well-being (or that adds to ps...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 17, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Beverley A. Searle, Susan J. Smith, Nicole Cook Source Type: journals

How work reconfigures an 'unwanted' pregnancy into 'the right tool for the job' in stem cell researchEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Tissue derived from the aborted fetus is considered 'the right tool for the job' in some stem cell laboratories. Relatively little is known of the arrangements in Britain for sourcing aborted fetuses for research purposes. This paper uses data from interviews with stem cell scientists, policy makers, tissue bankers, sponsors of stem cell research, clinicians and nurses, and 'pro-choice' and 'pro-life' activists to reconstruct the work involved in reconfiguring an 'unwanted' pregnancy into a source of fetal stem cells. A close scrutiny of the work allows the politics of collections to emerge. Aborted fetuses undergo a proce...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 17, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Naomi Pfeffer Source Type: journals

Rural young people and physical activity: understanding participation through social theoryEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Studies from around the world point to the inadequate participation of young people in physical activity and sport, and the consequences of this on their health. However, very few interventions to increase the levels of physical activity amongst young people have been sustainable. The aim of this paper is to use Bourdieu's notions of the logic of practice along with habitus and capital to theorise young people's participation in physical activities to add to the wealth of empirical material. Data are drawn from a cohort of rural participants in an Australian longitudinal, qualitative research project with young people from...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 4, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Jessica Lee, Doune Macdonald Source Type: journals

'Doing' chronic illness? Complementary medicine use among people living with HIV/AIDS in AustraliaEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article takes the use of complementary medicine by a group of people living with HIV/AIDS as the starting point for exploring the options for living with chronic illness in contemporary western societies. Some authors have suggested that the situation of living with chronic illness may not be a significant departure from the process of negotiating choice that is theorised to be a defining feature of late-modern society and that there are now many ways of living with or 'doing' chronic illness. This article uses these theoretical concepts to explore the experiences of people who have lived with HIV/AIDS for a number of...
Source: Sociology of Health and Illness - December 3, 2008 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Rachel D. Thorpe Source Type: journals