Sociology of Health and Illness 

About: Sociology of Health and Illness is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Health care & Medicine. It has an ISSN identifier of 0141-9889. Over the lifetime, 2833 publications have been published receiving 122257 citations. The journal is also known as: Sociology of health and illness.

The methodology of focus groups: the importance of interaction between research participants

Abstract: What are focus groups? How are they distinct from ordinary group discussions and what use are they anyway? This article introduces focus group methodology, explores ways of conducting such groups and examines what this technique of data collection can offer researchers in general and medical sociologists in particular. It concentrates on the one feature which inevitably distinguishes focus groups from one-to-one interviews or questionnaires – namely the interaction between research participants - and argues for the overt exploration and exploitation of such interaction in the research process.

Chronic illness as biographical disruption

Abstract: The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with a series of rheumatoid arthritis patients. Chronic illness is conceptualised as a particular type of disruptive event. This disruption highlights the resources (cognitive and material) available to individuals, modes of explanation for pain and suffering, continuities and discontinuities between professional and lay thought, and sources of variation in experience.

Loss of self: a fundamental form of suffering in the chronically ill.

Abstract: Physical pain, psychological distress and the deleterious effects of medical procedures all cause the chronically ill to suffer as they experience their illnesses. However, a narrow medicalized view of suffering, solely defined as physical discomfort, ignores or minimizes the broader significance of the suffering experienced by debilitated chronically ill adults. A fundamental form of that suffering is the loss of self in chronically ill persons who observe their former self-images crumbling away without the simultaneous development of equally valued new ones. As a result of their illnesses, these individuals suffer from (1) leading restricted lives, (2) experiencing social isolation, (3) being discredited and (4) burdening others. Each of these four scores of suffering is analysed in relation to its effects on the consciousness of the ill person. The data are drawn from a qualitative study of 57 chronically ill persons with varied diagnoses.

The rise of surveillance medicine

Abstract: Despite the obvious triumph of a medical theory and practice grounded in the hospital, a new medicine based on the surveillance of normal populations can be identified as emerging in the twentieth century. This new Surveillance Medicine involves a fundamental remapping of the spaces of illness. This includes the problematisation of normality, the redrawing of the relationship between symptom, sign and illness, and the localisation of illness outside the corporal space of the body. It is argued that this new medicine has important implications for the constitution of identity in the late twentieth century.

The genesis of chronic illness: narrative re-construction.

Abstract: In this paper I demonstrate the way in which people's beliefs about the aetiology of their particular affliction (arthritis) need to be understood as part of a more comprehensive imaginative enterprise which I refer to as narrative reconstruction. The intrinsically teleological form of this enterprise means that identified 'causes' represent only putative efficient connexions between the disease and antecedent factors but also narrative reference points between the individual and society in an unfolding process which has become profoundly disrupted. Through the presentation of case material taken from lengthy interviews I illustrate the way in which my question to the subjects about the cause of their disease: 'Why do you think you got arthritis?' was translated by them into a narrative reconstruction of their changing relationship to the world in which they live and the genesis of illness within it.