T he use of qualitative methods in health research has increased substantially in the past decade among researchers from a range of health disciplines. While qualitative research methods were developed by the social sciences, and it is in this literature that we find description of a wide range of approaches to their use, 1,2 there is also the approach of evaluation 3 and the practical focus of clinical disciplines such as general practice and nursing. 4,5 These different approaches draw upon a range of theoretical models and frameworks including health behaviour and community change models.
6It is not surprising, therefore, that there has been a lively debate between the disciplines about how best to conduct studies using qualitative methods. as an attractive option. The method certainly offers more opportunity for interaction with research participants when gathering and interpreting data. The most common approach to qualitative research studies in the public health literature therefore involves identifying a setting likely to yield rich data relevant to the research problem, conducting audio-recorded personal interviews with people in this setting, and then reporting the study by extensive and evocative quotations from the interviews. One advantage of this approach is that it does not demand extensive training in the social sciences and can deliver interesting and important insights into the experience of a health issue. The disadvantage is the limitation of such studies: we have little way of judging the extent to which the interesting conclusions drawn in one setting can be extrapolated to other social contexts or other social groups. This is the thorny issue of generalisability. There are qualitative methodologists who
This article focuses on the narratives and discussion produced through a memory-work study about menstruation with a collective of eight Australian women. Unfolding to exhibit a complex and contradictory experience of the body and menstruation, the narratives show that the body of a menstruating woman has cultural meanings inscribed that function to ensure the embodied experience of a menstruating woman is unfavourably different from the embodied experience of a non-menstruating woman. These women’s reflections on and discussion about their experiences express differences in the symbolic ordering of menstrual fluid as clean or dirty. The complex relationship between the meanings ascribed to menstruation and the social consequences of menstruating, especially the changed subjectivity and associations to the body was identified.
This paper contains some personal observations of life inside Woomera Detention Centre and certain aspects of the detained asylum seeker experience. This is from my own reference point as a psychiatric nurse who in 2002 undertook a six‐week contract at Woomera, and from my subsequent sociological reflections on this experience. I draw attention to the disintegrative effect of detention on the individual and the bleakness of everyday life symbolically expressed in for ms of self‐harm. Then, through the example of medication administration, I show the vulnerability of those in detention to bureaucratic procedures that become micropolitical sites, providing the machinery for dehumanising acts. I conclude by calling for sociologists, health care workers, and the public health community in general to take a more active political stance against a Government and its policies that actively erode spirit, the body and, for some, even life.
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