Читать книгу Contemporary Health Studies - Louise Warwick-Booth - Страница 49

Understandings vary according to social class and level of formal education

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Several authors (see Bury, 2005; Blaxter, 2010; Duncan, 2007 and Marks et al., 2015 for example) reference a substantial, seminal piece of published work examining beliefs about health by Herzlich in 1973. Herzlich carried out one of the earliest studies that looked at lay concepts of health in middle-class French people and she found that ideas about health were closely linked to the ‘way of life’ in urban living. The way of life was seen to mitigate against good health (by causing stress and fatigue) and to generate illness. In contrast, positive health was viewed as being something inherent within the individual – health as existing in a vacuum (acknowledged only by its absence or being ill), as a ‘reserve of strength’ and as ‘equilibrium’ (Duncan, 2007: 19). Ill-health resulted from the impact of environmental factors when there were not enough ‘reserves’. Blaxter (2010: 49) states that these three representations are also sometimes discussed as health being to do with ‘having, doing and being’.

Blaxter is an influential writer and researcher in the area of concepts of heath (see Blaxter, 1990, 2010). Her research has focused on exploring lay beliefs about health within the UK. An early study by Blaxter and Paterson (1982, cited in Blaxter, 2010) found that middle-aged women, and their daughters, in poor socio-economic situations defined health as ‘not being ill’ first and foremost. Blaxter’s (1990) Health and Lifestyles study found that the better educated and those with higher incomes used the ‘health as not-ill’ definition more frequently as well as the ‘health as psychosocial well-being’. This draws on a medical perspective viewing health as absence of illness.

Contemporary Health Studies

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