SOCIETY AND HEALTH

The research for this theme is conducted by teams of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, demographers and epidemiologists. The following areas summarise current efforts.

Life chances or life choices?

The broad focus here is on the interactions between individual and environmental level precursors to health and well being. We attempt to answer an age-old question: where does responsibility lie for health and well-being: are individuals making poor life choices or do social and physical environments rob people of healthy life chances? The research takes place at this intersection, using multi-methods to examine: how does social status ‘gets under the skin’ to compromise life chances? How do environmental resources and opportunities compromise health promoting choices? How do cultural trends influence what are considered healthy chances and choices?

Time and connectivity: key social health resources

We are contributing to the public health effort to understand which social environmental characteristics are health protective by focusing on ’time pressure’ and ‘social connections’. Time pressure affects health in numerous ways, influencing the amount and quality of time that people commit to physical activity and good nutrition, playing with children, and community participation. Community engagement and social capital are both health promoting, and are of particular relevance to rural Australians in the context of the prolonged drought.  

Pathways to prevention

Governments around Australia and internationally are acknowledging that abundant evidence regarding the antecedents to disease as been assembled. What they now seek are solutions. We are devising and testing theoretically informed models of behavioural risk factors, thereby highlighting intervention points for decision-makers. This novel form of analysis highlights the social processes that link health precursors (such as paid work or consumerism) to important health outcomes(chronic disease, mental health, obesity). Such theoretical modelling can inform the assumptions that go into statistical models. We are also keen to identify how citizens can become powerful health actors, and several of our PhD students have elected to incorporate this dynamic in their studies.