Читать книгу Contemporary Health Studies - Louise Warwick-Booth - Страница 15

This section is designed to help you get the most out of this book. The book aims to provide an in-depth multi-disciplinary overview of the field of ‘health studies’. Contemporary Health Studies focuses on what health studies is about as a discipline, examining how health is conceptualized in various ways and how it might be understood from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives. Health is known to be strongly influenced by social factors as well as individual ones and this book aims to explore this idea in some depth.

The book does not promote a particular theoretical viewpoint because health studies as a discipline draws upon a range of theoretical stances to allow for different perspectives to be applied to health-related issues. Indeed, the discipline encourages students to engage critically in the numerous discourses surrounding health. The book therefore examines, throughout the text, human experience of health as it is mediated by individual, societal and global contexts, putting particular emphasis on the social, political and environmental dimensions of health. An understanding of these issues is absolutely essential for contemporary health practitioners. Thus, the book contains a strong, up-to-date, social-scientific focus all the way through. The book is primarily geared towards undergraduate students undertaking a public-health-related course. However, it will also be very useful for undergraduate students studying a wide range of generic health-related courses, including clinical programmes such as dietetics, environmental health and nursing. Students studying health promotion will also find this book invaluable. Students at all levels of undergraduate study will be able to engage with the content and it should prove to be a useful companion to undergraduate programmes other than health studies. Whatever the specific ‘health’ focus of their course this book should enable students to engage actively with their learning and contemporary debates about health by providing active and meaningful opportunities to learn and reflect.

This book is designed to be used in several different ways. It can be read as a whole – from start to finish – since the chapters are organized in a logical sequence. Alternatively, readers might wish to select certain chapters for attention, depending on their interest or concerns and what might be relevant to them. Sections of each chapter that relate to other parts of the book have been highlighted in the text through cross-referencing, so that the reader can follow ideas and topic areas without having to read the whole book from cover to cover. The book is an introductory level text and so offers a comprehensive and contemporary framework of key topic areas within the discipline of health studies. It contains useful references to further reading, resources and additional material available on the companion website, allowing scope for those who wish to explore in more depth.

The book is also divided into three coherent parts and each part can be read independently of the whole. The first part sets the context for the book, exploring what health is, contemporary threats to health and how we investigate it; the second part focuses on disciplinary perspectives such as sociology, anthropology, health psychology and health promotion; the third part looks at influences upon health, ending with a set of contemporary case studies that brings everything together.