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Professor Dorothy Broom BA (Carleton College), MA (Illinois), PhD (Australian National University), FASSA. Current Position: Professor Contact Details: (Building 62, ANU map) National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health The Australian National University Canberra, ACT, 0200 Australia T: +61 2 6125 5546 F: +61 2 6125 0740 E: Dorothy.Broom@anu.edu.au

Research Interests

• Social trends underlying the rise in obesity and the lived experience of weight and embodiment
  Considerable research has been conducted on the individual risk factors and behaviours related to the contemporary ‘epidemic’ in obesity. This project takes a different approach to understanding increasing obesity. We are investigating several broad social trends identified by experts as contributing to the changing behavioural risk factors and resulting increase in the population prevalence of harmful body weight. The trends include: increasing ‘busyness’ and time pressure, escalating car reliance, greater use of convenience foods, and sedentary leisure. We are undertaking a cultural economy review of each trend covering the last 50 years, and conducting in-depth interviews with a cohort of older adults who grew up as the trends were developing momentum, and with a smaller sample of their adult children. The data from the cultural economy reviews supplies a broad national and international analysis of the sociocultural, economic and political contexts within which average body weight has increased. The interviews give a detailed picture of the classed and tended experiences of living within those contexts, with a particular focus on the range of behaviours and feelings related to weight and body size.

• Intergenerational transmission of health inequalities
  Health differentials associated with socioeconomic inequalities are now well documented. Education, income and occupational position are related to health status, but it is less clear how these differentials are created and sustained. Paid work appears to be an important mechanism in several ways. Pervasive health effects have been linked to position in an organisational hierarchy, work benefits and work conditions. Not only do workers in lower status jobs receive fewer benefits, they tend to experience less flexibility in their workhours, less job security and less control over their workloads. As well as affecting health, variations in working conditions affect workers' mood and these changes persist when workers go home.
  A team at NCEPH is extending existing research on work and health beyond the impact on individual workers to consider workers' families. Disadvantage and health inequalities accumulate over the life span, with early disadvantage setting the stage for compromised health in adulthood. Parent work conditions may affect children's health and wellbeing via their effects on resources important to children's cognitive and social development and health. While previous studies have focussed mainly on maternal employment and children's wellbeing, our research investigates fathers as well as mothers, and examines work conditions rather than employment per se.
  

• Gender and Health
  The history of women’s health and comparatively recent initiatives on men’s health raise both theoretical and empirical problems about the relationship between gender and health, and what exactly we might mean by ‘women’s’ and ‘men’s’ health. My research aims to explore questions surrounding the gendering of health and illness, which illness conditions and experiences might usefully be described as ‘gendered’, how they come to be so, and with what effects. The project involves development of a suite of case studies of specific chronic disease conditions to examine whether and how gender appears in the way people live with and manage them. It proceeds through interviews with patients and relevant service providers, and text analysis of published scholarly and popular writing about each disease. The first case study of diabetes Type 2 has produced several publications.
  

• Social meanings in chronic illness
  The experience and management of illness is formed in part by the social and personal meanings attributed to the disease, its symptoms and the practices and objects involved in dealing with it. Therefore, in order to improve clinical care and the quality of life of people with health problems, it is essential to understand the construction and effects of these meanings. A qualitative interview study explores how this chronic disease is understood by service providers and adults with Diabetes Type 2.

 

Selected Recent Publications

Broom DH, D’Souza RM, Strazdins L, Butterworth P, Parslow R, Rogders B. The lesser evil: bad jobs or unemployment? A survey of mid-aged Australians. Social Science and Medicine, 2006; 63(3): 575-586.

Craft PS, Burns CM, Smith WT, Broom DH. Knowledge of treatment intent among patients with advanced cancer: a longitudinal study. European Journal of Cancer Care, 2005; 14(5): 417-425.

Broom D, Whittaker A. Controlling diabetes, controlling diabetics: moral language in the management of diabetes type 2. Social Science & Medicine 2004; 58 (11): 2371-2382.

Broom DH. Diabetes self management: multiple technologies of self. Australian Journal of Primary Health. 2003; 9(2&3): 61-67

Broom DH. Familiarity breeds neglect? Unanticipated benefits of discontinuous primary care. Family Practice 2003; 20: 503–507.

Broom DH. Reading breast cancer: reflections on a dangerous intersection. Health: An interdisciplinary journal for the social study of health, illness and medicine 2001; 5(2): 249-268.

Broom DH. Public health, private body. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 2001; 25 (1): 5-9.

Broom DH. By women, for women: the continuing appeal of women's health centres. Women & Health 1998; 28(1):5-22.

Broom DH, Woodward R.V. Medicalisation reconsidered: toward a collaborative model of care. Sociology of Health and Illness 1996; 18 (3):357-378.

Broom DH. Masculine medicine, feminine illness: gender and health In: Gillian M. Lupton, and Jake M. Najman (eds), Sociology of Health and Illness: Australian Readings. Macmillan 1995:99-112