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Editorial
Fran Collyer
Department of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Sydney, NSW
Toni Schofield
Behavioural and Community Health Sciences, University of Sydney, NSW
Article Text
Welcome to the latest issue of the Health Sociology Review, a journal of The Australian Sociological Association's Health Section, published by eContent Management Pty Ltd. In this edition you will find articles and book reviews contributed from Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and South Australia), Canada, Lebanon, and Sweden.
The articles provide an indicative sample of the many different approaches to health and illness, health policy, and medicine that are being taken by sociologists at this time. Contributers have utilised qualitative and quantitative empirical approaches, provided theoretical and conceptual analyses, and offered reflections on pressing social issues.
Offering a quantitative approach to research, Gerry Veenstra from the University of British Columbia, Canada, utilises large data sets and statistical analysis to examine and demonstrate the relationship between social status and health. Veenstra concludes, perhaps not surprisingly, that there is a strong relationship between our subjective personal assessment of social status and our mental well-being.
Three of our papers draw from qualitative empirical studies. Katherine Carroll and Kerreen Reiger from La Trobe University in Victoria, examine the recent emergence of Lactation Consultants, a new occupational speciality. Having seen these experts in action this year when they cared for my daughter and brand new grand-daughter (Billie Adele, a little redhead who weighed in at only 6lb) and who was initially far too cross with the world to feed easily, I have only admiration for these (mostly) women with their enormous patience and good advice. And yes, surprisingly, even though we have been having babies and feeding them for thousands of years, knowledge about breastfeeding has changed. My advice as a grandmother was 'corrected' more than once by the Lactation Consultant, with a 'we don't do it that way anymore'. This paper takes the personal experience of breastfeeding into the professional, bureaucratic environment of the hospital, and reflects on the way these experts, working on the margins of medicine, constantly negotiate between medical and maternalist discourses, professional and nurturing roles.
Two Canadians, Colleen Reid (Simon Fraser University) and Carol Herbert (University of Western Ontario), use interviews and group meetings to investigate the impact of poverty and welfare on women. Both material circumstances and the processes of stereotyping are shown to lead toward social stigma and the adoption of negative health behaviours.
Jennifer Sarah Hester-Moore from the University of Melbourne, Victoria, examines other actors within the health and welfare system. Here we find a study of the approaches taken by health practitioners in the prescribing of contraceptives. Hester-Moore provides excerpts from interviews with practitioners to demonstrate the difficulties of following standard guidelines when faced with individual patients and uncertainty in medical knowledge about the relationship between libido and the use of contraceptives.
Two of the contributers eschew the empirical in favour of conceptual analysis. Michael Fine from Macquarie University in New South Wales explores the social position of carers as theorised in the work of feminist and philosopher Eva Feder Kittay. Although Fine demonstrates problems in Kittay's conceptualisation of power, he suggests that the framework appropriately places 'caring' in a central position within social life, and is able to account for a social activity that includes both formal and informal relations of 'caring'. Similarly, Michael Morrissey, from Northern NSW University, presents an analysis of how the concepts of 'race' and 'ethnicity' are used in research on drugs and alcohol. Despite decades of sustained critique about the use of 'ethnic' and 'race' categories as the basis for quantitative examination, Morrissey finds 'eminent researchers (empirically) utilising in one publication the very methods they have (theoretically) repudiated in others'.
In contrast to these empirical and conceptual offerings, two of our contributers, Jessica Whelan and Rob White from the University of Tasmania, provide a reflection on a current social issue with the potential to have a very significant impact on our health: the privatisation of the water supply.
This issue contains a wide selection of subject areas relevant to health and welfare: the health care workforce, its practices and knowledge base; the health care system and the relations of power between different kinds of practitioners, between practitioners and patients, and carers and dependents; social policy and poverty and its impact on women; public policy and the significance of the privatisation of water for our health; the connections between social status and health; and the relationship between race/ethnicity and alcohol/drugs in the research process.
Before you read and enjoy the papers in this issue, we'd like to take the opportunity to sincerely thank our many reviewers who continue to give a great deal of time and consideration to the papers we receive. As an 'old fashioned' journal that provides a venue for scholarship without taking payment from authors, reviewers are the 'linchpin' in the publication process. Without your help and expert advice to both authors and editors, this journal would not exist. Thank you.
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