bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The social‐interactional organisation of narrative and narrating among stroke patients and their spouses
Authors: Manzo John F. , Blonder Lee X. , Bums Allan F. 
Published: February 2004

AbstractThis study examines interviews with men who have experienced strokes.‘Control interviews' with persons who had experienced health problems not related to stroke were also conducted, and they are considered here as well. Unlike most studies of stroke patients' linguistic competence, which examine subjects in isolation and in clinical settings, these interviews were conducted in the patients' homes, with the patients' spouses present in all of the interviews. The analysis concerns the ways in which the spouses participate in the telling of narratives that describe the unfolding of the stroke event as such. At the beginning of every interview with stroke patients the interviewers asked what happened during the stroke proper. The spouses' participation in these stories is significant and sustained, whereas the patients' own mastery of such narratives is meagre although the narratives comprise details from their personal somatic experience. We specify several discreet interactional patterns that make up the stroke patients' dearth of agency in these tellings, compare the interactional dynamics in the interviews with ‘control’ patients, and discuss the significance of these interactional minutiae for the patients' well‐being and also for sociological investigations of ‘the brain’ and related issues.
Dying alone
Authors: Seale Clive 
Published: February 2004

AbstractThis paper draws on the accounts given by 149 relatives, friends and others who knew people who died alone. These are a subset of data from a larger national survey of a random sample of adult deaths. A critical assessment is made of the argument that in late modem society death is denied, ‘sequestrated’ or hidden away in hospitals and that community practices for containing the threat of death have atrophied. The accounts analysed here suggest that, in contrast, speakers are actively concerned to sustain an ideal of a caring community, seeking to locate people who die within its embrace. Speakers sought to preserve their moral reputations and ontological security by claiming membership of a community of care and concern. The accounts were also used to resurrect the hopes of speakers for the orderly continuation of social life in the face of the threat of death. Parallels to this are identified in the death rites of traditional societies. Professional (and governmental) interest in sustaining ‘community care’ is also analysed in relation to the treatment of death. Professional discourse commonly emphasises the benefits of a ‘natural’ death at home, away from what is depicted as the alienating environment of the hospital. However, both home and hospital contain possibilities of deaths alone, threatening the ideal of emotional accompaniment necessary to sustain the image of a caring community. While entry to hospital is often understood to be a placement beyond accompaniment it is by no means as great a threat as a death alone at home, which confronts speakers with a fantasy of abandonment that is difficult to repair.
The rise of surveillance medicine
Authors: Armstrong David 
Published: February 2004

AbstractDespite the obvious triumph of a medical theory and practice grounded in the hospital, a new medicine based on the surveillance of normal populations can be identified as emerging in the twentieth century. This new Surveillance Medicine involves a fundamental remapping of the spaces of illness. This includes the problematisation of normality, the redrawing of the relationship between symptom, sign and illness, and the localisation of illness outside the corporal space of the body. It is argued that this new medicine has important implications for the constitution of identity in the late twentieth century.
Appraisal of health risks: the roles of masculinity, femininity, and sex
Authors: Kaplan Mark S. , Marks Gary 
Published: February 2004

AbstractThe study examined the relationship between gender role orientation and appraisals of health risks. A random sample of college students from a U.S. university responded to the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). Subjects also were presented with sets of scenarios that depicted health‐threatening events. They rated the extent to which different environmental events and the degree to which immediate illness symptoms posed a threat to their health. The ratings did not differ significantly between men and women or between individuals who were above versus below the median on the masculinity dimension. The one consistent result was an interaction between femininity and sex of subject ‐ highly feminine men exhibited the highest health concern ratings compared to the other subgroups. Additional analyses ruled out potential confounding variables. The findings suggest that the extent to which males are socialised toward greater femininity appears to lead to a heightened sense of awareness and concern about health compromising circumstances. Our results are consistent with a growing body of psychosocial literature showing the beneficial effects of femininity on health and illness outcomes.
Threats to the good death: the cultural context of stress and coping among hospice nurses
Authors: McNamara Beverley , Waddell Charles , Colvin Margaret 
Published: February 2004

AbstractThis study uses Australian data based on interviews with nurses and participant observation in an in‐patient hospice and a community based hospice service to demonstrate how hospice nurses perceive stress in their work environment and cope with caring for dying patients. Stressors are discussed within a cultural context and are viewed as threats to the nurses' shared system of values which centres on the Good Death. The Good Death is conceptualised as a series of social events that involve the dying person as well as the other interactants who may include family, friends and health professionals. The death is defined as ‘good’ if there is an awareness, acceptance and preparation for death by all those concerned. The nurses' coping strategies and social supports are negotiated within the context of the hospice environment, and relate directly to the protection and affirmation of the nurses' shared value system.
Giving patients a future: the constituting of classes in an acute medical unit
Authors: Latimer J. 
Published: February 2004

AbstractDrawing on an ethnography of conduct within an acute medical unit, the paper explores how nurses and doctors constitute classes of patient to help accomplish their ordering work. For example, patients such as older people and those who are chronically sick are figured as having only limited medical futures. The current analysis suggests that staff deploy patients’ (perceived) social identities to help (re)figure them in particular ways to organise disposal. However, disposalemerges not so much as an effect of staffs moves, but as a mode of ordering in a world of multiple domains.
The politics of occupational ill‐health in late nineteenth century Britain: the case of the match making industry
Authors: Harrison Barbara 
Published: February 2004

AbstractUsing the match making industry as a case study, this paper examines the politics of occupational health in late nineteenth century Britain. It argues that this industry had a high profile within the wider political struggle around the question of working conditions and their effect on workers' health. This was due to the identification of match making with a specific and particularly disfiguring industrial disease, phosphorous necrosis, and that one firm, Bryant and May, featured prominently in the struggles around health and safety. This paper examines the role of employers, the state, and those demanding reform. It suggests that medical and dental ‘experts’ were important both in relation to their ‘official’ role with respect to factory regulation, and also because industrial ill health was a site of professional politics. The extent to which gender issues entered into the politics of occupational health at this time is considered. It concludes that mediation, compromise and the different priorities of the various interests involved prevented the dangers to health in matchmaking as in other industries from being controlled and eliminated in this period.
Reasons for consultation and explanations of illness among Finnish primary‐care patients
Authors: Punamaki Raija‐Leena , Kokko Simo J. 
Published: February 2004

AbstractThe aim of this study is to describe triggers to consultation, and to further understanding of how patients construct explanations for what is wrong with them. Patients consulting a general practitioner were interviewed about the process that had led to their consultation and explanations for the causes of their illness. The results show that the factors which trigger professional consultation are related to the everyday demands of work, home and other people on the one hand, and to the interpretation of bodily symptoms on the other. Characteristically, symptom interpretation often involves a veiled dialogue with the tax‐funded municipal health care system about a justification for the lay diagnosis. The results further show a domination of biomedical illness explanations among the patients studied. A third of the explanations concerned infectious, toxic and noxious agents, and a quarter constitutional defects in the body. Ten per cent were philosophical and metaphysical, and 16 per cent psychosocial in nature. The remainder were based on life style and risk behaviour, and on problems of medical care. The results are discussed from the standpoint of lay and professional models of explanation for illness.
‘Panic bodies’: discourses on risk and HIV antibody testing
Authors: Lupton Deborah , McCarthy Sophie , Chapman Simon 
Published: February 2004

AbstractWhile several recent sociological studies have sought to examine the reasons why people tend not to perceive themselves at personal threat of HIV infection, few have been explicitly directed at understanding the reasoning behind the decision to seek HIV antibody testing. This paper presents the findings from semi‐structured interviews carried out with adults living in Sydney who had had one or more HIV tests. Aspects relating to the socio‐cultural dimensions of the HIV test for those who have experienced it are discussed, including representations of HIV/AIDS in mass media education campaigns, assessment of partners and notions of HIV risk and contagion in the context of embodiment in the age of epidemic.
The Ethnic Patterning of Health: New Directions for Theory and Research
Authors: Smaje Chris 
Published: February 2004

AbstractThis paper argues that analysis of the ethnic patterning of health has failed adequately to examine the social meaning of ethnicity, while too often becoming enmeshed in unhelpful dualities which counterpose material to cultural explanations, multiculturalism to anti‐racism, and sociology to epidemiology. Against the background of anthropological, objectivist and postmodern theories in the broader sociology of ‘race’ and ethnicity, the paper develops a concept of ethnicity for the purposes of health research. This is used to evaluate biological, migration‐based, material, cultural and racism‐based explanations for the ethnic patterning of health. It is argued that these types of explanation are best understood within an interactive framework. The methodological implications of this for future research are discussed.
Doctor‐patient relationships in the private sector: patients’ perceptions
Authors: Wiles Rose , Higgins Joan 
Published: February 2004

AbstractRecent challenges to medical authority have been viewed as having an impact on relationships between doctors and patients. It is argued that these challenges have resulted in moves away from traditional paternalistic relationships. As a result of their market position, private patients as a group might be expected to be most advanced in bringing about change in the doctor‐patient relationship. Using data collected from a study of private patients, an analysis of patients' interpretations of their relationships with their doctors was undertaken. The patients' accounts indicated that relationships contained elements of both mutuality and consumerism. The features of the interaction, the organisation of health care in the private sector and the power of the medical profession are used to explain how these relationships develop. It is argued that there are tensions that exist in reality between the principles underlying each model which constrain relationships between doctors and patients moving too far in the direction of either consumerism or mutuality.
Condemned to be meaningful: Non‐response in studies of men and infertility
Authors: Lloyd Mike 
Published: February 2004

AbstractMale infertility has been under‐researched, and in part this seems due to a strong reticence by men to talk to researchers about infertility. Rather than suggest possible features of male infertility that might lead to this reticence, this paper explores how researchers have themselves accounted for the high non‐ response rates. The analysis details the way in which social scientific reasoning about non‐response incorporates both existing knowledge about infertility and everyday reasoning about health and illness. It is suggested that this process is a variant of a pervasive form of commonsense reasoning ‐ the documentary method of interpretation. The interesting upshot of applying this method to non‐response, is that an absence of information is ‘condemned to be meaningful’.
Managing social change: a process‐sociological approach to understanding organisational change within the National Health Service
Authors: Dopson Sue , Waddington Ivan 
Published: February 2004

AbstractUsing the implementation of the Griffiths Report as an example, this paper examines the way in which sociologists and others have examined the process of managing change within the NHS. Several studies of Griffiths have documented a number of unintended consequences of its implementation but it is argued that none of these have adequately theorised these unintended outcomes of the policy implementation process. It is suggested that the process‐sociological approach of Norbert Elias, and in particular his game models, enable us better to understand the complex interweaving of planned and unplanned processes which is involved in all processes of managed change.
Private medicine:‘you pay your money and you gets your treatment’
Authors: Thorogood Nicki 
Published: February 2004

AbstractThis paper looks at the issue of private health care from the perspective of black (Afro‐Caribbean) women in Britain. The research on which it is based (Thorogood 1988) indicates that these women have a particular relationship to health care, one aspect of which is their use of private consultations with General Practitioners. This is, I suggest, a consequence of their historical and contemporary experiences.
Socioeconomic class, classification of ‘abnormal’ behavior and perceptions of mental health care
Authors: Heller Peter L. , del Carmen Rivera‐Worley Maria , Chalfant H. Paul 
Published: February 2004

Summary The oft‐cited relationship between socioeconomic status and rates of mental illness was investigated in terms of lower‐class perceptions of certain‘disordered’behaviors and the sources of help, if any, thought relevant to these behaviors. It was hypothesised that certain types of behavior and perceptions of the environment which might be abnormal in middle‐class society are perceived as quite normal in the lower‐class world, and that lower‐class respondents will tend to describe such behaviors and perceptions as normal or only slightly extreme. It was further hypothesized that lower‐class living conditions lead to the development of an informal network of mutual aid relationships and a tendency to seek formal, professional mental health care facilities only for concrete and extreme examples of abnormal behavior.Data were taken from interviews with working‐ and middle‐class female respondents residing in two small West Texas towns. Perceptions of mental illness and care for such illness were elicited by seeking response to five examples of behavior patterns considered indicative of mental disorder by mental health professionals. Two other questions dealt with source of treatment respondent would use if she developed an emotional problem, and the source of information respondent would use to decide where to find help for an emotional problem. It was found that lower‐class respondents, more frequently than middle‐class respondents: tend not to define certain forms of deviant behavior as mental or emotional incapacities; tend to suggest informal rather than formal sources of help for these deviant behaviors; tend not to suggest using professional mental health specialists for treatment of emotional disorders; and use informal sources for information concerning treatment of emotional problems.
A question of balance: health behaviour and work context among male Glaswegians
Authors: Mullen Kenneth 
Published: February 2004

AbstractDiscussion of the persistence of social class inequalities in health has led to greater interest being paid to differences between the classes in lay health beliefs. Recent work on lay health beliefs, however, has mainly viewed social class as a proxy for wider aspects of lifestyle and paid less attention to its occupational component. Part of this can be explained by its predominant focus on the health beliefs of women. This paper remedies this imbalance by focusing on male Glaswegians' perceptions of the health effects of their occupations. It shows that not only were respondents very aware of the influence their jobs had on their health but that they also took action to redress the balance, either by compensating for such effects or controlling their work environment to minimise their influence. Respondents' degree of commitment to their work also had a direct bearing on their coping styles. Although traditional occupational class measures were found to obscure much of how occupation influences health, unskilled and semi‐skilled workers did suffer the greatest limitations in coping with the health effects of work.
The new reproductive technology: problem or solution?
Authors: Strickler Jennifer 
Published: February 2004

AbstractNew reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilisation, have been the subject of heated debate among academics, medical ethicists and policy makers. This paper examines the literature of physicians, infertile consumers of the technology and feminist critics, and argues that differences in the meaning of procreation are at the root of the debate. Physicians see it as a sphere of professional intervention; consumers focus on genetic transmission; and feminist critics see procreation as a locus for struggle over women's autonomy. Given these different meanings of procreation, empirical data and logical arguments will not resolve the conflict over reproductive technology.
Experiences of disabled health and caring professionals
Authors: French Sally 
Published: February 2004

Abstract The widespread discrimination against disabled people in most types of employment is well known. It would seem likely, therefore, that disabled people would find it difficult to gain access to the health and caring professions, although many people have argued that their personal experience of disability would be an invaluable asset to the professions and patients alike. By means of semi‐structured interviews this study aimed to gain insight into the experiences of people who had been accepted into the health and caring professions despite having a substantial disability. Although most respondents reported either positive or neutral attitudes from colleagues, a sizeable minority had experienced negative attitudes, especially when trying to gain access to training and during training itself.Negative attitudes from patients and clients were, in contrast, exceptionally rare. Most respondents viewed their disability as an advantage rather than a disadvantage in the work context, and although some people were restricted in the specialities they could follow, most could fulfil all of their work obligations.
Social class and the general practice consultation
Authors: Boulton Mary , Tuckett David , Olson Coral , Williams Anthony 
Published: February 2004

Abstract After assessing the evidence on social class differences in the rates and nature of general practice consultations, the Black Report proposed that middle‐class patients receive a better service from GPs than do their working‐class contemporaries. This paper reviews the literature on which this suggestion is based and presents further evidence from a study of communication in general practice, as to the extent and nature of social class differences in consultations.The results of the study suggest that middle‐class patients are more active than working‐class patients in presenting their ideas to the doctor and in seeking further explanation of his views from him or her. However, this greater activity does not necessarily mean that middle‐class patients get more benefit from the consultation, at least in terms of its cognitive outcomes: similar proportions of working‐class and middle‐class patients received explanations from the doctor and similar proportions misunderstood and rejected his views and advice. These findings point to the important distinction between ‘process’ and ‘outcome’ and underline the need for further research which assesses social class differences in the outcomes as well as the processes of consultations.
Review Article: Missing bodies – towards a sociology of embodiment
Authors: Turner Bryan S. 
Published: February 2004

C. Herzlich and J. Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1987, £20.50 (cloth), xvi + 271 pp., translated by E. Forster.W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990, £19.95 (cloth), x + 313 pp.D. Leder, The Absent Body, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990, £27.95 and £11.95, x + 218 pp.I. Löwy, The Polish School of Philosophy of Medicine. From Tytus Chalubinski (1820–1889) to Ludwig Fleck (1896–1961), Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic publishers, 1990, $78.00 and £44.00, vii + 287 pp., translated by I. Löwy.E. Martin, The Woman in the Body, a cultural analysis of reproduction, Milton Keynes, the Open University Press, 1989, £25.00 and £7.99, ix + 276 pp.M‐C. Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press and Oxford: Polity Press, 1990, $40.00 and £35.00, vii + 276 pp., translated by R. Morris.
‘Relapse’ to unsafe sexual behaviour among gay men: a critique of recent behavioural HIV/AIDS research
Authors: Hart Graham , Boulton Mary , Fitzpatrick Ray , McLean John , Dawson Jill 
Published: February 2004

AbstractRecent studies of gay male sexual behaviour have employed a concept new to the literature in the area. Men who appeared to have adopted safer sex behaviours and are now having ‘unsafe’ sex in relation to possible infection with HIV are described as having ‘relapsed’. In this paper we critically evaluate this concept. Firstly we undertake a methodological critique, looking in some detail at studies which have used ‘relapse’. We then provide a conceptual critique, suggesting that the construction of human sexuality implicit in the use of this term is inappropriate to the study of sexual behaviour. Finally, we suggest why a concept such as relapse should appear in the literature on the HIV/AIDS epidemic at this time.