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Time: 6 hours
Level: Intermediate
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 Introduction Resource- The unit begins by exploring the notion implied in the title that health pervades all parts of our public and private lives. It will become clear that although health is everywhere, it takes different...
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- 1.1 Introduction Resource
- We have suggested that health is everywhere so let's put that to the test. It certainly seems that you cannot pick up a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV without sooner or later encountering a...
- 1.2 Health and the media Resource
- There is certainly no shortage of coverage of health topics in the media. Every night television has at least one, and frequently two or three programmes about aspects of health. There are specific programmes...
- 1.3 Views on health Resource
- Already we have encountered health in many places and many guises. Having introduced the vast territory which deals with health, let’s take a few steps back and, without trying to pin it down to a single...
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- 2 Accounting for health Resource
- Until relatively recently most of the information available to us about how people think about health and illness was concerned with non-Western societies. There was a time when a search in a good anthropological...
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| | 3 Health as social representation
- 3.1 Health and low income Resource
- Health is a very personal matter, but people's health is very much situated in their life experiences and so their perceptions of health are likely to reflect their social situation.
- 3.2 Health and the middle class Resource
- In contrast, a study which focused on white, middle-class men and women between the ages of 35 and 55 (Saltonstall, 1993) found that respondents' views of health were closely connected to wellbeing, and...
- 3.3 Health and ethnicity Resource
- Clearly ethnicity, religion and culture have a great deal of influence on the way people view health. It was noted in the introduction to Section 2 that most of the early work was on health beliefs and...
- 3.4 Health and children Resource
- So far, all the studies we have discussed have been based on adults. Health viewed through children's eyes is receiving attention, mainly in order to be able to target health promotion messages. Bendelow...
- 3.5 People's views on health Resource
- Health accounts, as well as being based in the experience of health, also relate to health behaviour. People's accounts of health are likely to be different at different stages in their lives. Two health...
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| | 4 The ‘lay/professional’ axis
- 4.1 Introduction Resource
- As we said at the beginning of the last section, much of the impetus in earlier work on lay perspectives was to examine how far they deviated from the ‘true’ knowledge of experts. Now the emphasis has...
- 4.2 People knowledge Resource
- Stacey (1994) has made a passionate plea to understand the ‘power of lay knowledge’ which she prefers to call ‘people knowledge’. Stacey claims that two fundamental assumptions underline the importance...
- 4.3 Understanding lay knowledge Resource
- Popay et al. (1998) are also concerned that lay knowledge be taken seriously to help us understand the causes of variations in health status found in different social groupings. It has been suggested that...
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- 5 Quality of life Resource
- ‘Quality of life’ is beginning to be seen as significant by health policy makers. But this raises all kinds of problems about evaluating initiatives to promote wellbeing and quality of life.
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- 6.1 Introduction Resource
- Although clearly related, the concepts of illness and disease are distinct. People have illness and physicians diagnose and treat disease. Disease is an objective term which implies a malfunctioning of...
- 6.2 Concepts of Illness Resource
- Sontag (1979) wrote about the metaphors we use to describe illness. Metaphors are ways of speaking about something as if it were something else which is imaginatively but not literally applicable, for...
- 6.3 Responsibility for health and illness Resource
- In Activity 6 you explored factors which influence people's experience of health and we noted that inequalities in health are clearly related to the conditions of people's lives, such as their housing,...
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| | 7 Moving to a positive paradigm
- 7 Moving to a positive paradigm Resource
- Aaron Antonovsky (1984) has called the emphasis on illness and disease the pathogenic paradigm and has stated that this disease-focused paradigm has dominated our healthcare system. He claims that there...
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- 8 Summary and key themes Resource
- In this unit you have been introduced to a diverse range of ideas about health. To recap, the themes and ideas you have met in this unit are:
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| | References and Acknowledgements | |
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