Читать книгу Contemporary Health Studies - Louise Warwick-Booth - Страница 31

The first part of this book critically examines a range of issues that address the overall question ‘what is health?’ It is divided into three chapters and, together, these chapters set the scene for the whole book and the general context of the discussion within it. The question ‘what is health?’ is key to any text about health studies and this is why a substantial part of this book is devoted to addressing it.

Chapter 1 specifically explores the question ‘what is health?’ This chapter offers an overview and a critical in-depth discussion about the nature of health, how we define it and how we experience it. This chapter facilitates deeper reflection on a term that is used a lot and often taken for granted. It considers how health is defined and the different things that might influence definitions, as well as how we understand and experience health. The chapter challenges the singular, but widely held assumption that health is the absence of disease and offers a variety of different understandings and explanations as alternatives. It draws on both lay and theoretical perspectives illustrating contrasting and competing ideas and constructing a debate about health that moves beyond received wisdom.

After considering what health is in the first chapter, chapter 2 considers the contemporary threats to health and provides an overview of the main issues and challenges in relation to public health within the twenty-first century across the UK and much further afield. The nature of threats is conceptualized and then changing patterns of health threats are analysed. The chapter outlines the contemporary threats to public health including climate change, population growth and poverty. The chapter examines both communicable and non-communicable diseases and evaluates the threat of these to contemporary societies. The chapter also considers issues such as emerging epidemics and the implications of these for public health. Finally, lifestyle

diseases as a threat to health are discussed critically.

The final chapter in this section, chapter 3, Investigating Health, goes on to discuss how health might be investigated, measured and researched. This chapter gives an overview of the importance of research in relation to health and introduces the research process as a whole. The various methods and processes by which health information is gathered and analysed are presented, illustrating the importance of researching health for health studies. Quantitative and qualitative approaches to researching health are presented and critiqued, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of different data-gathering techniques. The chapter provides a clear outline of the research process for students, who can use this to inform the development of their dissertations at undergraduate level.