Article
Social Health: From Theory to Empirical
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Authors
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Joshua Paul
- Medizinische Hochschule Brandenburg Theodor Fontane, Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany
| Published: | September 6, 2024 |
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Outline
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Introduction: This poster qualitatively anchors our theoretical conceptualisation (Paul et al 2023) by empirically exploring the shape, form and indeed the wider meaning of social health through qualitative data. The poster aims to qualitatively explore our notion of social health; to develop the understandings of and insights into the routinised actions of people in relation to these practices; and to make qualitative sense of the relationships between care and other social practices that interconnect to social health.
Methods: The data originates in a COVID-compliant longitudinal ethnographic study of social health in Germany spanning August 2020 through to December 2022 (Paul et al. 2022). We conducted semi-structured interviews, which were analysed using elements of grounded theory.
Results: Our core empirically evidenced contention is that health and wellbeing are made in and sustained by practices, conceived not as individual behaviours that people enact but rather as social practices fundamentally anchored in banal care work. Our care anchored social health lens compliments and extends beyond the frame of the insightful social practice literature on health (cf Blue et al 2014) that examines social practices correlated with perennial themes in public health discussions such as obesity, alcoholism and smoking to consider the minutiae of health in everyday care practices.
Conclusion: Our theoretically informed and empirically engaged notion of social health locates the patterning of daily lives (and their implications for health) as outcomes of the coordination and synchronisation of social practices which persist over time and space, and which are reproduced and transformed by those who ‘carry’ them. Such an approach, we contend, holds rich potential for theorizations of health and significant practical implications for how interventions are implemented and how health is best sustained and the conditions created in which it might flourish. In considering social health and the care practices which constitute them as topics of analysis and as sites of intervention in their own right, we might deepen theoretical understandings of health as well as enrich interventions.
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.
