Information for healthy living

This project was undertaken with colleagues in Canada and was an empirical investigation into how mid-life and older adults in specific locations in Ontario, Canada and South East England respond to healthy living messages.

Project aims

The project aimed to improve understanding of mid-life and older adults' engagements with the discourses of self-care, personal responsibility and choice in the context of the new 'healthy living' imperative.

A qualitative study examined everyday practices of healthy living and forty-four semi-structured interviews were undertaken with Canadian and UK citizens, aged between 45 and 70, in April–May 2010. Researchers aimed to show how health information is mediated, both by people and technologies, and employed in the context of 'good' health citizenship.

Throughout this work, notions of 'choice' and 'empowerment' have been interrogated, theoretically and empirically – the objective being to reveal both the knowledge/power relationships integral to 'informing' processes and the shifting relationship between information and care in contemporary health encounters.

Project findings and impact

The project resulted in several publications which have contributed to the debates about:

  • responsibilisation in health care
  • the informatisation of health care and
  • the need for an alternative to the ‘informed choice’ agenda.

Research team

Professor Flis Henwood

Output

Spoel, P, Harris, R and Henwood, F (2014) Rhetorics of health citizenship: Exploring vernacular critiques of Government’s role in supporting healthy living, Journal of Medical Humanities 35: 131-147.

Spoel, P, Harris, R and Henwood, F (2012) Healthy living: metaphors we eat by? Present Tense, 2 (2).

Spoel, P, Harris, R and Henwood, F (2012) The moralization of healthy living: Burke's rhetoric of rebirth and older adults' accounts of healthy eating. Health, 16 (6). pp. 619-635.

Harris, R, Spoel, P and Henwood, F (2012) Integrating the imperatives of healthy living in everyday life. In: Deng, M, Raia, F and Vaccarella, M, (Eds.) Relational concepts in medicine. Probing the Boundaries/series 'The Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease' (163). Interdisciplinary Press, Witney, UK.

Henwood, F, Harris, R and Spoel, P (2011) Informing health? Negotiating the logics of choice and care in everyday practices of 'healthy living'’.Social Science & Medicine, 72 (12). pp. 2026-2032. 

Partners

Associate Professor Philippa Spoel, Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada

Professor Roma Harris, University of Western Ontario, Canada