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In this paper we examine how popular media reporting positions dating and hookup app use as a 'social problem' that impacts on health and wellbeing. The paper adopts a mixed-methods media studies approach to create and analyse a dataset of over 6,000 international news articles published within a 12-month period, drawing on thematic content analysis and inductive and deductive techniques. These analyses are framed in relation to online consultations with Australian sexual health professionals and app users. Applying Briggs and Hallin's theory of biocommunicability (2007) – which proposes that contemporary health professionals' scientific framing of public health problems are, in part, shaped by popular media discourses – we identify a significant category of supportive discussions of safer app use within social news and lifestyle reporting. This discursive space features what we have termed 'vernacular pedagogies' of app use, revealing app users' safety strategies, and their experiences of pleasure and playfulness. We argue that an analysis of popular media can provide valuable insights into how everyday experiences of safety, risk and wellbeing are being shaped and contested with dating and hookup app use, and that these insights can be used to develop meaningful health promotion strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the articles within the issue of the journal on topics including need post-structuralist concerns of Deleuze and Guattari, sociological commentary on new developments in drugs and historical perspective on the development of anorexia nervosa, is presented.

Despite the frequent occurrence of unwanted disclosure of HIV status in Australia, there is little understanding of its determinants and consequences. This paper offers an analysis of lived experiences of unwanted disclosure amongst 28 people with HIV in urban settings in Australia. Of the 28 individuals interviewed, 17 men and 8 women had experienced unwanted disclosure of their HIV status by other people in work, health, social and other settings. Through the lenses provided by the concepts of habitus and agentic practice, this paper focuses on unintentional and deliberate practices of unwanted disclosure, and the consequences that may arise from this. Findings reveal how unwanted disclosure may lead to reflexive and agentic action among people with HIV as they struggle to reclaim control over their lives and how they are perceived. Despite what is sometimes assumed, the negative social responses the HIV epidemic has given rise to persist in Australia. Some 30 years into the epidemic, findings highlight the need to establish a social climate that is intolerant of unwanted disclosure, and which recognises the damage it may cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of gender affirming hormone therapy for transgender and non-binary people is a rapidly developing area of gender affirming healthcare. While research indicates the benefits of providing gender affirming hormone therapy through interdisciplinary primary care-based models, less is known about how service users and providers construct their understandings of affirmative approaches. In this paper, we present findings from a discourse analysis of four service users' and four healthcare professionals' talk about a primary care-based pilot clinic providing gender affirming hormone therapy in Aotearoa New Zealand. Participants employed notions of pathologisation, time, and agency in their talk to construct the clinic as a personal setting which gave service users time to make their own health decisions, while constructing hospitals as impersonal with lengthy wait times. The assessment-driven nature of best practice guidelines that governed clinicians' decision-making was constructed as constraining users' agency. Findings highlight the ongoing importance of aligning gender affirming hormone therapy with other non-disease types of healthcare, and suggest new ways for achieving this through affirmative approaches to healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of post-industrialism in western societies saw social theorists pay greater attention to the blurring of traditional work and life conceptual categories and the growing role of service professions. Further, much of the theorisation around the human service professions has focussed on occupational stress and professional burnout. This focus on the challenges to worker health has limited considerations of how human service professionals can thrive, and not just survive, in demanding employment contexts. In response, the paper considers the 'lifeworld' as a conceptual resource that can encourage new ways of thinking about the work of human service professionals, as well as reworks this resource using the concept of affect to expand consideration of the interconnected, inter-subjective, bodily and emotive nature of human service work. The paper concludes by presenting a heuristic tool that can make these concepts more accessible to professional discourses and can facilitate their use within collaborative research with the human service professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for the poor, the marginalised and socially excluded to live healthier and longer lives has in recent times become paramount in the development literature and policy discussions seeking to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In response to this, attempts are being made to redirect the research focus to examine socio-economic factors underpinning disease occurrence and ill health for health planning policies and practices to benefit the poor and vulnerable in society. Tliis paper explores the relationship between socio-economic conditions and health outcomes. It identifies and examines through participatory rural assessment techniques, basic socio- economic factors acting as significant pathways through which poverty increases the susceptibility of rural households to diseases. It seeks to address the reasons why the poor are poorer in health in rural communities of the Amansie West district of Ghana. This paper thus emphasises how social stratification and inequalities could affect quality of life of people in any given society, hence supporting the theory of social suffering and its implications on societal health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon literature from economics, and the human capital and equity fields in order to present a theoretical framework for a new multidimensional measure of poverty for Australia. Poverty is about having low living standards; but its measurement has traditionally focused only on an individual's income or on other dimensions of living standards that are not appropriate for contemporary Australian society, such as calorie intake. There are two additional capabilities individuals require for adequate living standards: health and education. Each of these is required for basic functioning within modern society, but have traditionally been ignored by measures of poverty. This paper argues that health is a basic capability people need for a fulfilling life, allowing individuals to participate in activities essential in modern society, and that education can also be seen in this light. As such it is vital that health and education be included in measures of poverty. In order to move Australian poverty measurement forward and build upon the work of the past, poverty measurement must move its focus away from only looking at low income, and take a holistic focus on the living standards of individuals by incorporating assessments of health and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor health and disease and the nature of interventions to ameliorate them typically generate opportunities and costs. What diseases are prevalent, which interventions are favoured and what factors fuel the nature of health interventions are recurrent concerns for political economists. This paper examines the prevailing viewpoints about what health policy works and what does not. Drawing on evidence from developing countries, it shows that there are many deficiencies in the prevailing orthodoxy which emphasises state, market, and civil society solutions. The paper suggests that health policy debate must be refrained around poverty and social inequality, constructs which are often subordinated to attaining grand ideological goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synopsis: In this article, we propose to understand the doctor- patient relationship (DPR) using a health communications perspective, as it is located in the sociohistorical framework of modernising processes. The paper analyses the academic literature about the doctor-patient relationship (DPR) during the period of 1980-2015, gathered from key words in digital collections and indexed magazines available in three electronic databases (SISBI, SciELO and DIALNET). Eighty-four articles were selected from the initial search. The results suggest three axes of thematisation of the DPR over the period analysed: patient satisfaction, models of relationship between professionals and patients, and eHealth. The latter, eHealth, demonstrates the current transformation of social and communication order and is the main axis of reflection and investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing with ethics in health economics on socio-philosophical grounds is not yet well established. This paper shows how a liaison between the system theory of Luhmann and the philosophy of Taylor can be used to analyze and justify the incorporation of ethical considerations into health economics. One rationale for the incorporation of ethical consideration into health economics is the deficiencies in capturing all relevant needs of health system participants with common (welfare) economics. A second reason why health economics should account for ethical values is the fact that its decisions are already based on implicit value judgments. The impact of our approach is exemplified by the concept of 'quality adjusted life years' (QALYs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The branding of ayurveda as a market strategy for the health consumer has become an important factor in the creation of 'New Age orientalist desire'. Using Vedic Village as a case, this paper shows how new age orientalism has been spread in modern India to middle class professionals, entrepreneurs and overseas health tourists. With this representation, ayurveda has become a wellness therapy instead of a means to restore health, and affluent people can now buy a package of 'ayurvedic healthy life' without changing their lifestyles. In addition to Euro-American health tourists, emerging middle class professionals and entrepreneurs in modern India have also become an integral part of the process of 'new age orientalization'. This paper concludes that the commodijied version of ayurveda, which has been developed in the West as part of 'wellness and spa culture', has become popular among the affluent middle class in India and abroad today, and through this the West has claimed and justifies authority over Eastern medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a study of the specialist field of the sociology of health and medicine, and examines its institutional development in Australia. A thesis is developed about the relationship between the field and the parent discipline of sociology. The formation of the discipline and the specialist field are proposed to have occurred in stages: the formative years, a period of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration, a stage of intensification and organisation, the years of institutional growth and specialisation, the decade of consolidation and fragmentation, and, its most recent phase, a time of 'new' internationalisation. Moreover, the institutionalisation of the sociology of health and medicine has closely followed the developmental trajectory of its parent discipline, even though its disciplinary boundaries have been, and continue to be, less rigid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of the impact of casualised and independent contractor work place arrangements on the psycho-social health of 72 workers in regional Victoria. It contributes to our understanding of the crisis in rural Australia in its use of qualitative methods focusing on the impact of work on health and well-being. There is some evidence in the literature that casualised work arrangement enhance the health and well-being of workers by giving them a sense of autonomy and freedom to negotiate their conditions of work. On the other hand, these arrangements may make an already vulnerable group even more vulnerable to uncertain work conditions, poor pay and uncertainty for their future with a significantly negative impact on their health and wellbeing. The results of these interviews support this latter perspective and show that these workers do not experience freedom and autonomy, but rather lowered social status, insecurity and serious limitations to their ability to manage their health, psychological wellbeing and social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global economic turmoil that has unfolded since August 2007 promises to change methods for the governance of ageing in ways yet unknown. Against this background, this paper asks how the demographic shifts associated with population ageing interact with other aspects of globalisation: the financialisation of economic systems, changing patterns of migration and transformations to health provision. The emphasis is on understanding the complex interplay between these processes and their relevance for rethinking approaches to population ageing in a time of uncertain transition. Questioning the tendency to understand these fields of change as precipitating distinct crises, the paper suggests that the relative predictability of global population ageing makes it an appropriate area in which to begin a reassessment of wider policy directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health researchers in a number of settings are expressing concern about the 'gap' between what we 'know' about the social determinants of health and of health inequalities, and the lack of action based upon this 'knowledge'. Indeed, the 'know-do gap' has become almost a mantra echoed across international and some national institutional sites. This paper examines how the 'problem' of the 'gap' is understood and represented in dominant and sub-dominant conceptualisations. It highlights what is missing from these representations: adequate reflection on changing modes of governance of research management. Where once there was a degree of separation between research production and government policy, increasingly there is congruence between these governmental functions. This congruence means that the problem we face today is not a 'gap' but rather a 'fit' between what we 'know' and what we (don't) do regarding SDH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the way some public health campaigns in Australia have been caught within a paradigm shift in the management of 'risk society'. It details this paradigm shift in terms of an intensification of political technologies of 'pre-emption' in response to incalculable threats to physical security. The challenge this presents to public health programs, particularly those dealing with 'life style' health problems such as obesity, depression, and drugs (illegal and legal), is that, in pursuing admirable aims of the prevention of ill-health in the population, such campaigns need to avoid reproducing (and indeed should counter) the harmful effects of the pre-emptive approach to security. Using the example of 'quit smoking' campaigns of 2006-7, key features of the preemption paradigm are outlined, particularly the conservative comportment toward the future that it fosters. With reference to Foucault's concept of 'political technologies of bodies' and Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the temporality and intercorporeality of bodies, the paper also explores deleterious effects of this approach to risk and health on human agency, well-being, and social relations in general. The negative impact of the pre-emption approach is outlined in terms of the way it tends to dampen the openness (or 'potentiality') of bodies toward the future, the world, and other people. However, the temporality and intercorporeality of bodies also explains the operation of resistance by human agents to both the paradigm of pre-emption and the health prevention strategies that employ its way of thinking. This provides the basis for a gesture toward a more 'democratic', respectful, and effective approach to the promotion of health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social gradient in self-reported health in Argentina, and at the provincial level, explores the extent to which self-reported health and mortality indicators provide dissonant health profiles. This study is based on a secondary analysis of Argentina's 2001 Survey of Living Conditions. A significant gradient in self-reported health was observed by income quintile, but self-reported health and mortality indicators were not significantly correlated at the provincial level. Respondents from deprived regions were most likely to report being in good health, despite living in areas with low life expectancy and high infant mortality; in other words, respondents from areas of poor population health nevertheless report good individual health. Unless acknowledged, this will ultimately lead to an underestimate of the social gradient in health. The implications of this notion for tests of the income inequality hypothesis are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses mediation in the patient–provider relationship arising from the introduction of digital technology for a specific form of monitoring: 'clinical self-tracking'. Focusing on the management of type 1 diabetes, a condition that requires significant self-management by patients, we describe how the actors negotiated a new ICT-mediated relationship in three hospital departments. The analysis followed a qualitative design and was carried out by interviewing patients, clinicians and technology developers and by analysing messages exchanged through the ICT tool. We first show how each department customised the system by drawing on already existing care practices, organisational goals and representations of the department's desired relationship with the patients. We then focus on patient–provider relationships, showing that, while the clinical self-tracking sometimes followed the path desired by the providers, at other times, it developed in unexpected ways. We distinguish among three emerging categories of self-tracking: self-tracking for remote management, self-tracking for e-learning and self-tracking as boundary setting. The analysis reveals how the new patient–provider relationship arises from an open-ended process. Providers can push self-tracking practices but cannot steer them; and patients, through an unexpected use of the self-tracking technologies, are able to negotiate a desired relationship with providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide is a very contemporary issue in the USA. Despite the social characteristics related with suicide, the discipline of sociology has remained relatively silent on the issue. This paper builds upon Durkheim's approach by using social capital theory as a framework to examine suicide rates across 2688 US counties. Using ordinary least-squared regression modelling, we found that counties with higher rates of social capital, diversity, and population density experienced lower suicide rates. Counties that had higher levels of divorce, unemployment, poverty, education, and median age experienced higher suicide rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, consumers in Australia and elsewhere have increasingly been confronted with a fast growing number of health food products. This profusion of health foods is accompanied by a proliferation in popular culture of professional nutritional advice on 'what is good to eat'. The genre of lifestyle magazines is one popular medium via which healthy eating practices and health foods are frequently reported. In this paper we use a visual discourse analysis of food-related editorial and advertorial content sourced from the long running and popular The Australian Women's Weekly to investigate how lifestyle magazines have been one important locus for constituting health conscious consumers. Taking up a Foucauldian governmentality perspective we trace how this active, responsible conceptualisation of the consumer, which we refer to as 'healthy food consumer', has increased in prevalence in the pages of The Australian Women's Weekly over time. Based on our analysis we suggest that the editorial and advertorial content offers models of conduct to individuals about what possible preventative activities in which to engage, and plays an important role in shaping how we think about taking care of our health through eating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food is a significant part of the daily worship, health and social life of individuals across cultures and religions. This is especially the case for vegetarian religious minorities such as the Indian sub-continental borne Hare Krishna movement, the Christian Seventh-Day Adventist Church and various Buddhist groups. These devotees define spirituality as more than simply the state or quality of being committed to 'God', religion and immaterial spiritual concerns. This paper argues that there are visible, tangible and even biological frames of reference from which spirituality within the aforementioned religious groups should be considered. The concept of bio-spirituality introduced here, embodies and grounds matters pertinent to faith, health and worship in the everyday social actions and interactions of devotees both inside and outside the sphere of the temple or church. Bio-spirituality is a conceptual tool that accounts for the relationship between supernatural belief, and the natural physical environment. It was formulated to encapsulate the social, nutritional and spiritual dimensions of 18 self-identified religious vegetarians who were interviewed as part of larger qualitative study of alternative food habits and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent critiques of contemporary obesity discourses that link 'modern Western lifestyles' to an 'obesity epidemic', the population's weight remains a central concern of current dietary guidelines. Food choices that are considered beneficial to maintaining a certain weight are understood to play a key role in one's health. This concern reflects medico-moral assumptions about the properties of food and what people should eat. However, the impact of obesity discourses on different individuals and social groups is rarely considered, although there is some evidence that people do generate, reflect and resist the norms and standards set for them, including those that relate to food/weight. In this paper, we will examine the perspectives on fatness and food choice amongst Black and White women and men living in Vancouver and Halifax, Canada. With this examination, we will challenge conventional assumptions about the singular 'modern Western lifestyle' that leads to obesity concerns by teasing out some of the social, cultural and political contexts within which people conceptualise issues regarding weight and make their food choices. By examining the experiences of both women and men we will also provide important insights into the gendered ways in which people engage with obesity discourses and the injunction to 'eat healthily' as a form of weight management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthy eating in schools is central to UK Government attempts to redress nutritional deficiencies and combat childhood obesity. However, there is little consideration of the local, contextual spatial factors that contribute to the ways in which particular policy initiatives are experienced at the school level. This paper presents findings from an evaluation of the 'Eat Well Do Well' programme in Kingston-upon-Hull, UK: an innovative scheme providing free, healthy food to all primary school children. Data is presented from an ethnographic study of two case study schools illustrating how notions of 'spatiality' augment our understanding of the ways policy intention is mediated. We consider the potential of primary school meals policy to address health inequalities using the concept of 'spatiality' to examine the interconnections between the aesthetic, temporal, social and spatial elements of school dining environments. We conclude optimistically, suggesting that an engagement by health policy developers with what we call the 'spatial imagination', might be useful in examining and developing factors that ensure the effectiveness of interventions addressing the determinants of ill health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one on biomedical understanding of health and another one on obesity.

The four years from 2001 to 2005 saw the roll out of an innovative social enterprise on one of Melbourne's high rise public housing estates, Atherton Gardens. It provided residents with access to personal computers, computer training, an intranet, internet and email, as well as establishing a training room, open access computer lab, repairs workshop and a help desk service for computer users. This paper reports on a three year research project which was undertaken to assess the impact of this initiative and to analyse its effects, not only on residents' access to and use of new forms of information and communication technologies, but also the less tangible effects of an electronic network on health, social capital and community well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the HIV/AIDS crisis in Kenya is causing the death and disablement of so many prime- aged adults, households are increasingly being headed by adolescents and the elderly. The purpose of this paper is to examine the health status of one of the most vulnerable groups in Kenyan society - adolescent women - and to explore how the type of household head impacts on their health status. Using data from the 2003 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS), an indicator of illness signs was used as the dependent variable for health status. Significant differences were found in the health status of adolescent women in households headed by adolescents, prime-aged adults, and the elderly. Even when controlling for demographic factors, residing in an adolescent headed household increased the odds that an adolescent woman would have recently experienced some signs of illness. Other factors which also increased the odds of illness were being married and being in the older age group (20-24). Wealth barely had any impact on illness. Service providers need to pay special attention to the needs of adolescents in non-adult headed households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of the categories bisexual and men who have sex with men (MSM) in sex, sexuality and sexual health research. We study the deployment of these categories in the research literature, using sets of studies published between 1990 and 2004 (bisexual set: n = 2,859; MSM set: n = 986). These sets were established using an approach developed by the authors in an earlier review of sexual health literature for the World Health Organisation (WHO). The approach uses insights from Weberian methodology. We ascribe value to research outcomes which provide contextually sensitive evidence for the design and/or evaluation of sexual health interventions, and are concerned about the creation within research of subjects who become reduced to risky or at-risk groups, or subject of public health surveillance and control. The categories bisexual and MSM are mostly ascribed without attention to social or cultural settings, and to designate risky or at-risk populations or behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the critical importance of sociological theory; and the role of bio-medical, bio-mechanical, and bio- digital technologies in sex, sexual health, and intimacy.

There are numerous ways that researchers can creatively approach social research and translation. This article discusses elements from the first stages of a novel project that centres social research translation in the form of a public exhibition. 'Creative Approaches to Health Information Ecologies' is a project by a multidisciplinary research team in collaboration with an Australian health consumer organisation. The project uses creative workshop methods to explore how people learn, think, and feel about their bodies and health states, and brings attention to the significance of communities, places, spaces, objects, and other living things – the 'ecologies' of health information. It then builds on these insights to create an interactive exhibition of materials designed for public engagement. This reflexive article unpacks how this creative translation-centred collaboration contributed to the make-up of the project team, the project's research methods, and the process of making exhibition materials. We discuss what the research team learned from the process about creative collaboration, research-creation, and research translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses articles published within the issue on topics including reproductive health among Bolivian migrant women in Argentina, mechanisms for priority setting for the care of cancer patients, and social disparities and health inequalities.

Increasingly, people turn to online sources for health information, creating human-non-human relationalities. Health websites are considered accessible in scope and convenience but can have limited capacity to accommodate complexities. There are concerns about who gets to 'assemble' with these resources, and who is excluded. Guided by Ahmed's socio-political theories of emotions, we questioned our feelings as we intra-acted with a consumer information website about back pain (MyBackPain). This encouraged us to approach resource evaluation in a way that alters conventional rational/cognitive judgement processes. Our inquiry was 'supra-disciplinary' involving public health, sociology, allied health and consumer collaborators. Specifically, we considered relationality – the feelings circulating between bodies/objects and implicated in MyBackPain's affective practices; impressions – the marks, images or beliefs MyBackPain makes on bodies/objects; and directionality – how these intra-actions pushed in some directions and away from others. Although Ahmed would likely not consider herself 'post-humanist', we argue that her socio-political theories of how objects and emotions entangle are of great interest to furthering critical post-human understandings of health. Rather than threatening decision-making, we suggest that feelings (and their affects) are central to it. The article demonstrates the productive potential of critical post-human inquiry in identifying/countering 'othering' possibilities, and catalysing a 'nomadic shift' towards new human-non-human formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I develop a feminist posthumanist account of biomedical policymaking as a material-discursive intervention that shapes the emergence of phenomena in the scientific laboratory. The setting is United States (U.S.) biomedicine, where a recent policy of the National Institutes of Health has mandated the consideration of sex in basic and preclinical research. Called Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV), the mandate configures cell lines and animal models as the next frontier in the project of advancing gender equity in biomedical research. Given sex and gender are increasingly recognised as having complex, entangled, and dynamic effects on human health and illness, how do laboratory animals respond to their attempted enrolment in this regulatory intervention? Through a qualitative analysis of this policy domain, I show how laboratory animals reveal the context-specific character of sex, its multiplicity and elusiveness as a so-called biological variable, and the considerable work needed to shore up human ideologies of sex as a pervasive cross-species form of binary difference. I suggest that while regulatory interventions constrain patterns of mattering, they also serve as agential openings in which laboratory animals can 'kick back' and reconfigure the pursuit of knowledge, particularly as it relates to difference and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding transgender health on a world scale requires an adequate conceptualisation of gender as an embodied social structure, and an awareness of imbalances in the global economy of knowledge. Four major clusters of health issues are identified for trans groups in the majority, postcolonial world: staying alive in the face of violence and disease, keeping a trans life afloat in practice, facing pressures including rising populism, and making transitions work. Familiar models of professional health care are not adequate to these issues across much of the world; social action and organising are required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lactation is a potent signifier of maternal love and care commonly associated with early motherhood and infant survival. It is common, however, for bereaved mothers who have recently undergone miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death to produce breastmilk. Drawing on a critical feminist lens that seeks to understand how maternal subjectivities and lactation norms are constructed through public and reproductive health information, this article tests whether lactation management options after stillbirth and infant death are comprehensively covered in Australia's health organisations' online information. A qualitative directed content analysis was conducted to critique the information provided on 21 Australian websites. Information extracted from websites was compared to a 'best-practice' Lactation After Infant Death (AID) Framework developed by the research team for the review. We found a notable absence of comprehensive lactation management information targeted directly to bereaved mothers. Moreover, the most common lactation option presented for women without a living infant was lactation suppression. This dearth of appropriate and comprehensive lactation information curtails maternal subjectivies and diverse lactation practices and further isolates women dealing with the painful contradictions of lactation after loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that people with higher socioeconomic positions and women smoke less, avoid alcohol abuse, and eat more healthily. Yet far less is known about the interaction of socioeconomic status with gender, especially in the Italian context. Here we address this issue by employing Abel’s adaptation of Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and Courtenay’s theory of gender construction and health. Using 2012 data from the Multipurpose survey on Daily Life, we first show that cultural capital is better than social class in predicting an adult’s compliance with health recommendations, although this does not hold true for alcohol intake. We then look at the interaction of gender with cultural capital measures in order to determine how gendered forms of consumption change with increasing levels of cultural capital. The results show that the gender gap diminishes at higher levels of cultural capital following a twofold pattern: most often men’s marginal benefit increases at a higher rate than that of women; however, we also find evidence that the gap diminishes because women start adopting unhealthy behaviours as their level of cultural resources increases. Overall, these findings indicate that cultural capital plays an important role in reconstructing gender role models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an approach to understanding health that acquires an original and autonomous development across different Latin American countries, despite being the result of reading and analysing national and international theoretical contributions from social sciences. The proposal seeks to integrate the epidemiologic perspective with those from the social sciences, sociology, and medical anthropology in particular, raising the need to place health problems in their socio-historic, cultural, political and economic context. From this framework, such aspects must be treated not only as epidemiological variables but, above all, as sociocultural and bio-ecological processes. It suggests to conceptually work from a perspective that investigates health-disease as a social process, an area of life in which most of the meanings, representations and practices that allow the reproduction of daily life are articulated. For that, we place the contributions in the field of Collective Health, present the main criticisms and limitations that have been raised to modern epidemiology and, from there, we develop theoretic-methodological proposals of ethno-epidemiology and sociocultural epidemiology directing the analysis towards the development of a superseding episteme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sperm donor profiles in catalogues exhibited in commercial sperm bank websites provide health information about each donor, both explicitly and implicitly. Donors' anonymity poses a great challenge to signalling credibility. Inspired by both Spence's signalling theory and Walther and Park's warranting theory, the study explores the way sperm donors add credibility to their self-presentations. Profiles of 135 donors from nine sperm banks in Europe and North America were content analysed; 36 of these donors' baby photos were visually analysed. Donors compensated for the paucity of usable warrants by adding intensified emotional context to the profile and inviting potential recipients to join a fantasy family. The article concludes with some practical recommendations aimed at facilitating the process of donor selection for the benefit of donor insemination users, as well as fertility practitioners, and sperm donors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript outlines the multiple methods utilized in a long-term follow-up of a non-traditional population: Homeless substance abusers in New Orleans. This article addresses qualitative mental health research by outlining steps taken to explore both qualitative and quantitative data sources. By way of qualitative and quantitative methods, this research examines the life course of a sample of New Orleans homeless substance abusers from the time they entered into treatment (1991) until the present and observes the quality of their social bonds and their long-term outcomes. By making use of mixed methods, this research gives a more thorough understanding of mental health, specifically examined through homelessness and substance abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon research involving in-depth interviews with 60 mothers of young children about the home healthcare in which they engage when promoting their children's health and dealing with their illnesses, allergies or developmental problems. The study found that a series of often interconnected discourses were evident in the women's accounts. These included the discourses of health states as controllable, good health as an outcome of good management and the child's body as vulnerable. Other discourses were related to the concept of the 'good mother'. The interviewees also employed the discourses of home healthcare as emotionally distressing and as hard work and of children's illness as a mother's loss of control. As this suggests, such caring was often an intensely embodied and negative emotional experience for the mothers, particularly if they felt as if they had lost control over their children's bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First Australians, the Aboriginal people, have lived on the Australian continent for about 60,OOO years. Australian Aboriginal cultures are the oldest living cultures in the world. Their ability to adapt to change is one of the reasons they have survived for so long (Johnson, 1998). Colonisation, dispossession of land and trans-generational trauma have meant that today Aboriginal people of all ages are dying from non-cancer diseases which are terminal but are not necessarily recognised as such by health systems until the terminal phase of the illness. Many Aboriginal people express a desire to die in their own communities (Sullivan et al, 2003). Flexible models of palliative care which have a basic understanding of the diversity of the Aboriginal culture are crucial in providing accessible and relevant palliative care. This article describes our endeavour to date to culturally adapt the HOME Hospice model of care to the Kurunpa: Keeping Spirit on Country care model. Kurunpa is for Aboriginal people of all ages, and enables them to return to their country in remote areas or to stay in their own home in regional/urban areas of Australia, to 'finish up' (die) there. It empowers community members and family members to support the dying person's carer/s in this important journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health and wellbeing is defined internationally as a multi-dimensional and holistic concept, particularly within Indigenous worldviews. However, in Australia there is a lack of detailed frameworks supporting such definitions that are founded on Aboriginal knowledges. Tins study aimed to explore Aboriginal perspectives of child health and wellbeing in an urban setting. Qualitative interviews with 25 care-givers of Aboriginal children living in Melbourne, Australia were conducted. Aboriginal people and community controlled organisations were collaborative partners in all stages of the research. A conceptual fiamework of Aboriginal child health and wellbeing in an urban setting was developed comprising four main themes: Strong Culture; Strong Child; Strong Environment; and Strengths and Challenges. Aboriginal conceptions of culture are considered central to Aboriginal child health and wellbeing in an urban context. A holistic framework that privileges Aboriginal knowledge of child health and wellbeing has not previously been available. Further exploration of socio-ecological models within Aboriginal child health and wellbeing contexts is needed. This study identifies dimensions for further exploration in research, policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age and ill-health have long been identified as being intrinsically intertwined, however the boundary between the discourses of ageing and chronic illness is not easy to demarcate. It is possible, however, to shed some light on the interplay between the ageing body and chronic illness by considering how differing cultures of ageing play a key role in articulating a dichotomy between seeing chronic illness as an aspect of health or of ill-health and age-related decline. Using knee pain as an example we argue that to understand how the interplay between ageing and chronic illness influences the interpretation of knee pain as 'ageing well' or as a sign of impending decline and physical dependency, then we need to employ a discursive methodological approach which explores talk as a form of action designed for its local interactional context and pays attention to what statements mean in the context in which they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous cultural training for health workers is an increasingly popular intervention designed to improve the health services provided to Indigenous peoples in Australia. The provision of this training is based on the recognition that the measured discrepancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health outcomes is in part influenced by cultural difference and a history of racism in Australian society. Indigenous cultural training in Australia predominantly draws on a 'cultural awareness' framework which seeks to educate health workers about 'Indigenous culture'. To date, evaluations of Indigenous cultural training programs have found them to have questionable efficacy, although most of these evaluations have been methodologically inadequate. This article draws on postcolonial theory to explore the limitations of Indigenous cultural training as it is commonly conceptualised. Issues of essentialising 'Indigenous culture', 'otherness' and the absence of systemic responsibility for culturally appropriate health service provision are discussed. Finally, we consider future directions for Indigenous cultural training that are useful to both Indigenous service users and the health workers charged with 'closing the gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to highlight a link between housing and health that may have been underestimated: the pathway from poor health towards marginal housing in caravan parks. Almost all research on links between housing and health is derived from large-scale surveys and correlational analyses which suggest a causation path from poor housing to poor health. The big picture of such studies may in fact disguise a reality for a smaller group where poor health leads to class 'slide' and reduced housing options. Qualitative data and life histories from interviews probe such 'reverse' links and also flesh out contextual backgrounds. It is argued in this article that evidence from interviews with 10 caravan park managers and 50 residents from 16 parks in outer Melbourne and rural Victoria supports general arguments that poor health appears to be a pathway leading to marginal housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we examine how older Australians' accounts of family meals mirror shifts in the Australian way of life over the second half of the twentieth century coupled with their changing personal circumstances as they age. We provide qualitative accounts of these changes drawn from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 111 men and women resident in greater Melbourne and born in the 1920s and 1930s. Mostly, study participants have retained many of the habits and practices of their youth, although changing domestic arrangements, aging and health concerns have impacted on their culinary habits. When young they learned to view food as a utilitarian necessity and this attitude has translated, in later life, into a concern for its health effects, often signalled by changing body weight and shape. The most obvious impact of evolving Australian foodscapes on their culinary habits is that they now dine out more frequently and consume a great diversity of food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the United Nations Millenium Declaration of 2000, the establishment of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) has been identified as a significant strategy in addressing the alarming levels of poverty and marginalisation that have accompanied global development. SHGs are small, voluntary associations of people from the same socio-economic background that have been established for the purpose of solving shared social and economic problems through self-help and mutual help. Such grass-roots commonality, it has been assumed, will promote community empowerment and prevent economic marginalisation. Such an assumption is largely based on the global, neo-liberal agenda of seeing the withdrawal of the State from social provisioning. SHGs have been widely adopted in India, especially to eliminate the social exclusion of poor women and improve their access to health. This article reviews the scope and limitations of SHGs in improving women's health, focusing on their implementation in the State of Bihar in India. It critically assesses the extent to which SHGs can be involved in attaining better health for women and children by exploring the crucial role of caste and class in access to health services. The article concludes that solutions such as SHGs, which emanate from international policy circles, fail to capture local structural contexts such as caste and class and, as a result, develop instrumentalised approaches that are unlikely to produce equitable health services provision to poor and marginalised people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In writing about community participation in health, the term 'community' is used loosely and ambiguously. On analysis, it appears that there is a conceptual shift in health policy to thinking about involvement of consumers in health planning and programs rather than communities. This shift is consistent with a managerialist approach to planning health service delivery. Participative processes are perceived as being initiated and directed by health administrators. Participants in the processes are to be 'representative' of health service consumers, rather than whole communities. However, in many Australian rural communities, there are enduring traditions of community participation in providing governance for local hospitals, developing infrastructure for general practice services, and providing in-kind support. Participation in health services is embedded in the way the community functions. Acknowledging and understanding the ways in which 'community participation' and 'consumer participation' are different may result in more effective participative processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]