Health Sociology Review最新文献

ABSTRACTPeople develop their own ways of enriching the healthiness and tastiness of certain foods, or of their diet, overall. This is often pursued through trial and error, which in this context involves trying, eating, assessing, reflecting, then trying again. Trial and error involves sensory learning, embodied know-how and routinised engagements with information sources such as recipes and social media, as well as with friends and family, and health professionals. Individual instances of trial and error vary, but it is recognisable as a social practice. More specifically, this paper argues that trial and error is a dispersed practice. As such, it supports adaptation, improvisation, insight and information-seeking within other food and health practices. To examine trial and error as a practice, this paper shares findings from a qualitative study of rural and urban Canadians' everyday food lives. The study, through ethnographic techniques such as video tours, explored how people become and stay informed about food. Findings illuminate how trial and error bolsters and connects related food and information practices, and shapes their evolution over time.

The ubiquity of negative childbirth experiences, and their repercussions, are gaining increased global attention. 'Humanizing birth' principles, developed by social science and midwifery scholars, promote relationship-based care tailored to women/birthing people's needs. Midwives play a vital role in birth experiences, but little is known about how they form their perspectives on and capacities to facilitate humanized birth. To address this gap, this study analyses Australian midwives' and students' views of a good birth, a good midwife, and the factors assisting or preventing them facilitating humanized birth experiences. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews elicited participants' (n = 23) perspectives. Participants consistently articulate a specialized midwifery approach and knowledge base aligning strongly with humanizing birth principles. However, they describe having their expertise dismissed within the hospital-based birth system, thus prevented from practicing according to these principles and the evidence base. We argue this constitutes epistemic injustice, with testimonial injustice occurring when midwives'/students' knowledge is wrongly overridden by others with higher status in the professional hierarchy, and hermeneutical injustice perpetuated by epistemic assumptions built into the healthcare system itself. Unable to deploy their expertise, midwives experience epistemic stress and are driven to leave the mainstream birth system, further diminishing the possibilities of humanizing birth.

This paper explores the paradox between middle-class consumers' understanding of healthy eating and their actual food practices which often contradict to their knowledge, in the middle-sized Chinese city of Kunming. Based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted across various food consumption settings and in-depth interviews, the study examines how middle-class consumers navigate tensions between aspirations for healthy eating and the realities of modern life. Drawing on social practice theory, it investigates how materialities, competences, and social meanings collectively shape food behaviours, complicating efforts to actualise healthy and sustainable consumption. Unlike international studies suggesting that raising environmental consciousness or promoting health-related knowledge directly leads to sustainable and more nutritional food choices (Hansmann, R., & Binder, C. R. (2020). Determinants of different types of positive environmental behaviors: An analysis of public and private sphere actions. Sustainability, 12(20), 8547; Jaiswal and Aagja, 2024), this research reveals that middle-class consumers in Kunming were equipped with substantial knowledge about healthy diets but struggled to enact these ideals due to competing demands, temporal, and socio-material constraints.

There is increasing impetus to help individuals navigate health and social care systems. Though the development and effectiveness of navigator roles have long been explored in health and sociological research, evaluations of navigation are typically narrow in focus and oriented to individual outcomes, quantitative metrics, or barriers and enablers in implementation. Investigating the structural effects of navigation, especially across disparate contexts and sectors, presents significant challenges for researching navigation. To explore these challenges, this article presents a critical interpretive synthesis of qualitative literature on navigation spanning health and social care. Twenty qualitative studies were included, with analysis organised across four themes: (1) modalities of navigation practice; (2) epistemic authority and professional identity; (3) authorising navigation in and through place; (4) situating navigation and its effects in systems. We conceptualise navigation as operating via dual modalities of structural and interpretative practice, and argue this conceptualisation facilitates closer critical attention to the relational and situated practices often obscured in accounts of navigators' work. We also highlight a need for strengthened research designs that reflect the complexities of care systems and consider the effects of navigation across multiple sectors. We finally reflect on emerging challenges posed by digital and algorithmic tools in navigation.

Online food delivery platforms (OFPs) are reshaping food consumption across Southeast Asia, with Indonesia at the forefront due in part to its rapidly expanding digital economy. Longstanding public health campaigns such as 4 Sehat 5 Sempurna (4 Healthy 5 Perfect) have historically shaped national understandings of nutrition in Indonesia. At the same time, a growing urban middle-class is increasingly adopting globalised lifestyle-oriented concerns around food hygiene, body weight and 'wellness'. The growing use of OFPs by many middle-class households has introduced new tensions between traditional health ideals and convenience-driven digital food practices. Drawing on an ethnographic study of households in Surabaya, this article combines Social Practice Theory (SPT) with the concept of multiple modernities to examine how health, hygiene and food provisioning are negotiated across diverse temporalities, infrastructures, socio-economic contexts and cultural beliefs and practices. It examines how households navigate competing demands of time, taste, intergenerational preferences and trust, while engaging with a diverse provisioning landscape that includes wet markets, local warungs (small family-owned eateries), supermarkets and platform-based food options. By situating these dynamics within Surabaya's layered urban modernities, the article contributes to broader debates about digital food consumption and shifting and emergent health practices in the Global South context.

The mass migration to social media for nutrition advice has amplified the health risks of false or decontextualised information. Existing countermeasures such as fact-checking, boosting media literacy and behavioural 'nudges' treat the problem as one of cognitive vulnerabilities. Yet everyday interactions with social media, like scrolling, liking and posting, are mostly practices guided by platform design and social rewards. This conceptual paper reframes nutrition-related misinformation (NRM) through Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice. We show how the online field of digital food cultures, the capital of likes, follows and sponsorships, and an embodied digital habitus together normalise sensational, influencer-led content while marginalising evidence-based voices. Bringing disparate literatures on NRM, digital food cultures and practice theory into conversation, we map the specific mechanisms that embed misinformation in users' routines - parasocial intimacy, affective storytelling and algorithmic amplification. Recognising practice as the unit of analysis reveals why cognition-focused remedies deliver only modest, context-dependent gains. We propose practice-level interventions that seek to disrupt the field of social media through the voices of resistant health professionals and developing a resistant habitus among users of social media sites.

A long-standing debate in agrifood sociological work explores how consumer attitudes and behaviours regarding food consumption contribute to healthy food systems. This debate is particularly evident in the study of Alternative Local Food Systems (ALFS), where the potential of 'ethical consumption' to reorient food production-consumption relationships and improve human and ecological health, including food security, remains a subject of ongoing inquiry. Individual consumption from systems of alternative forms of food production (organics, agroecology) and distribution (cooperatives, food hubs) reflect changing consumer values and practices towards sustainable diets. This paper contributes to health sociology by taking a theoretical approach to this debate and drawing on scholarship exploring the relationship between ethical consumption and systems transformation. By examining how different consumption theories (ethical, sustainable, green and political) grapple with the individual-collective dilemma, it offers insights into the determinants of health by demonstrating how ethical consumption, ranging from individual values to collective activism, can influence access to heathy food and ultimately shape health outcomes. It also examines ALFS' contributions to promote collective modes of consumption. This sheds light on how collective agency might prompt deeper food democratic shifts beyond individual consumption, potentially supporting healthy and sustainable diets.

Healthism, a neoliberal ideology that frames health as an individual responsibility and moral duty, inherently operates as a blame-the-victim framework, attributing health outcomes primarily to personal choices and behaviours. This qualitative study critically examines healthism's influence on community-based hypertension care in China, particularly its reinforcement of individualised blame and patient distress. Based on semi-structured interviews with 18 community health professionals and 17 hypertensive patients in Shenzhen, the study reveals that while self-care is promoted as essential to hypertension management, it often fosters feelings of inadequacy and social isolation, particularly among patients struggling to meet the expectations set by healthcare providers. Participants also report emotional distress exacerbated by socio-economic challenges that remain unaddressed within the healthcare system. Moreover, the individualisation of health responsibility erodes trust between patients and providers, as patients internalise failure when unable to adhere to prescribed lifestyle modifications. This study critiques the reductive association between patient autonomy and improved health outcomes, advocating for a more holistic approach to hypertension care that acknowledges broader social determinants of health and prioritises structural support for patient well-being.

One understudied aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is the opportunity it provided for nurse practitioners (NPs) to practice autonomously and therefore professionalise. We undertake a quantitative analysis to understand how the pandemic impacted scope of practice laws governing NPs in the United States. We find that NPs were newly granted at least temporary autonomy in 22 US states, and that those policy changes were associated with increasing COVID-19 caseloads. We construct an analytic narrative that situates the COVID-19 pandemic in the larger context of NP professionalisation under physician dominance. We argue that NPs professionalised by achieving small wins of establishing presence, building legitimacy, forming coalitions, and gaining ubiquity between legislation and a pandemic. We use the case of NP professionalisation to build the concept of a professionalisation opportunity structure, which we define as a framework of conditions available for an occupational group to gain autonomy and which consists of periods of small wins punctuated by field-level changes. A professionalisation opportunity structure provides an explanation of professionalisation that transcends intra-occupational dynamics and could be applied to other healthcare occupations seeking to professionalise under physician dominance.

While the discourse on care is largely pessimistic, brilliance happens, demonstrated by instances when care exceeded expectation. To advance brilliant care scholarship, this article asks, what are the domains that enable it? Through a reflexive analysis of ten publications on brilliant care, four domains were constructed and justified - namely: a relational orientation to care; attentive engagement; working with and beyond the technical aspects of healthcare; and shared responsibility. This article concludes with an invitation to those who receive, deliver, manage, develop policies that are relevant to, or conduct research on health service management - namely, to consider how these domains can be improved and how they can be systematised and translated into policy and practice, without compromising their dynamic quality.