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The ‘lifeworld’ of health & disease and the design of public health interventions
1. The ‘lifeworld’ of health & disease and
the design of public health interventions
Federica Russo
Philosophy & ILLC, University of Amsterdam
@federicarusso
Joint work with Mike Kelly
2. Overview
PH interventions
Examples and challenges
The evidence base of PH interventions
Biological and aetiological approaches
Social determinant approach
The lifeworld
Conceptualization and operationalization
Evidential pluralism
The lifeworld in design of PH interventions
Lessons from COVID-19
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6. A lot is achieved, but not enough
Think of:
Preventable infectious diseases that nonetheless spread, e.g. measles outbreaks
Preventable non-infectious diseases on the rise, e.g. obesity
A third (fourth?) wave of COVID after the summer?!
6
7. Why is it so?
Our diagnosis:
The social dimension of H&D is not sufficiently integrated into the study of the biology
of H&D
PH interventions do not tackle social factors enough or in an appropriate way
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9. The biological and aetiological approach
The dominant paradigm: it focuses on the biological causes of H&D
We opened the opaque box of H&D, down to the molecular level
Social factors are largely classificatory, not explanatory, or causes in a proper sense
Social factors are associated with risks, in a classificatory rather than explanatory
way
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10. The social determinants approach
Socio-economic factors (and inequalities) map onto health patterning at societal
level
Social epidemiology
Quantitative sociology of health
It establishes that social factors are linked to health, not how-why
Tendency to go as granular as possible in measuring social factors
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12. The concept of ‘lifeworld’
We build on the sociological work of e.g. Schutz, Giddens, Bourdieu
Each and every one of us inhabits our own lifeworld
It is constituted of the assumptions, understandings, and taken for granted aspects of our everyday
existence
It is the seat of our sense of self, and the ideas we have about who and what we are, and who and
what others are
We anticipate the actions of others and we anticipate the effects that our actions will have on others
in our lifeworld
It consists of the things we do, the actions we take, the practices in which we engage on a day to day
basis
It is what we do, and our bodies are like a book in which we inscribe all the many things we do and
we experience
Any aspect of our life can be described in terms of the lifeworld experience, including health and
disease
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13. Structures without mechanisms?
Traditional sociology of health:
Role of institutions, social support, power structures, communication …
But:
Typically at high level of abstraction, not always or necessarily anchored to ‘local’
mechanisms
Largely theoretical, not supported by quantitative (or qualitative) analyses
This approach to social structures and health largely misses explanatory power
(and thereby a potential use for the design of PH interventions)
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14. Lifeworlds and mixed mechanisms
Lifeworlds need not remain abstract descriptions of (aspects of) life
In the lifeworld, mixed mechanisms of H&D operate
Biological and social factors are on a par to explain and intervene on H&D
How to detail aspects of mixed mechanisms?
Existing approaches: exposure research, epigenetics, allostatic load, life-coarse approach,
…
But we can do more
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16. A question of method
‘Lifeworld’ helps with conceptualizing H&D
But how to study in practice the mixed bio-social nature of H&D?
This, is a question of method
16
17. More measurement?
‘The problem of more measurement’:
Increasing the granularity of measurement of social factors won’t do
More measurement doesn’t carry explanatory power on its own
Not quantity but quality
Which (social) variables we want to measure
What we we intend to measure with these variables or proxies
Theoretical underpinning to measurement provides partial descriptions of the
lifeworlds
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18. At the extremes of measurement
Age
Very easy to measure
Does it just represent a definite
biological status?
Does it have any explanatory import?
SES
Very controversial how we should
measure it
How can it represent one’s status?
What is its import in explanation of social
or social / health outcomes?
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19. Measuring socio-economic status
Theoretical approaches
Weberian, Marxist, Colemanian, …
Identification of different indicators, different types of variables
Procedure: class stratification
E.g., Goldthorpe Class Schema
Grouping of types of workers
Why measuring SES?
E.g., correlation with health outcomes, or other economic variables, …
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20. Why measuring SES for H&D?
Categorise?
A classificatory variable
What part of the populations are more exposed, have higher prevalence …
Explain?
Active part in the explanation of diseases
Mixed aetiology!
What are the active causal pathways from exposure to outcome?
Social practices / norms / habits to explain (and to prevent) exposure
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21. Measuring age
Easy to measure
Accessibility of data, straightforward question, …
How to measure it
Categorically, Continuously
Using Age
Control: Adjust results of statistical analyses (control for age)
Predict: Age structure helps predict results
Categorise: Grouping and collapsing multiple categories into fewer categories; Care with loss
of information, residual confounding
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22. Why measuring age for H&D?
‘Demographic’ age: Locating individuals in the ‘right’ age group
Biological age: A typical health status, for that age
Social age: Social practices that are typical of that age
Epigenetic age: Our internal clock, possibly different from our chronological age
…
[these meanings of age do coincide, possibly they overlap]
Any explanatory import in using age?
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23. More description?
Qualitative, small-scale approaches to H&D can provide the details of the lifeworld
What happens between actors, why, under what conditions, …
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24. Complementarity and mutual help
Methodologically, quantitative and qualitative approaches really are
complementary:
Detailed qualitative studies may give hints about what to test at large scale, population
level;
Conversely, quantitative studies may allow unexpected correlations (or lack thereof) to
emerge deserving an in-depth qualitative study
See Mixed Methods Research
At the level of policy making, we need to know and understand which mechanisms
are really culture-specific and which mechanisms are instead more general
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26. Evidential pluralism for a more solid
evidence base
In order to establish a causal claim, we typically need evidence of correlation and of
mechanisms
An epistemological and methodological thesis (not ontological!)
About mutual support of correlations and mechanisms (reinforced concrete analogy)
The claim is partly descriptive and partly normative
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27. Enlarging the evidence base
What do we take evidence of?
Both correlations and mechanisms
About both biological and social factors
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29. Designing interventions for COVID-19
Aetiology
The biology of COVID
The sociology of COVID
Socializing, touch, sneezing, working
environments and work practices,
shared households, age, ethnicity, …
Prevention
Vaccination
Any other interventions would and
should need detailed descriptions of
the mixed-mechanisms on the
aetiology side
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31. Everyone agrees that social factors are important for H&D
But how we integrate social factors in the explanation of H&D and in PH
interventions does not follow the statement of their importance
WHY??
Because we need a concept of lifeworld to account of the mixed aetiology of H&D
The lifeworld can be studied and operationalized with mixed methodologies
We can then design PH interventions that target factors at the ‘right’ joints of the
mixed mechanism
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32. The ‘lifeworld’ of health & disease and
the design of public health interventions
Federica Russo
Philosophy & ILLC, University of Amsterdam
@federicarusso
Joint work with Mike Kelly