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Towards Understanding Women's Health through a Social Determinants Lens
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Wuest, Judith A. |
| Copyright Year | 2006 |
| Abstract | Women’s health is a compelling, complex, and prodigious domain for nursing research. Our ways of thinking about and studying the health of women have been influenced by shifting models of health, from absence of disease, to personal responsibility through lifestyle choices, to, finally, social determination.The strength of a social determinants perspective for understanding women’s health is its acknowledgement of the influence of social context, at macro and micro levels (Moss, 2002), not only on health outcomes but also on patterns of promoting, maintaining, and regaining health. Neither biology nor personal responsibility are ignored, but rather they are understood within the context of social, economic, environmental, and political contexts at the societal, familial, and individual levels. Health Canada’s 1999 Women’s Health Strategy provides an excellent background to the complexity of a social determinants perspective. While nurses recognize the importance of a social determinants model for understanding the intricacy of women’s health, rarely do they explicitly situate their research studies in this framework. More often, the social determinants perspective is introduced after the fact. If a social determinants model guides the research, frequently the focus is on one or two determinants or solely at an individual level.To some extent, this relates to the complicated nature of the social determinants perspective. Making sense of women’s health in a way that accounts for multiple determinants at both macro and micro levels requires advanced research skills and a complex research plan, whether the approach is rooted in traditional science or in naturalism. Another deterrent is the fact that research situated in a social determinants framework may be less identifiable as “health” or “nursing” research, especially if the implications focus on policy or structural changes outside the realm of what is traditionally considered health or nursing.While lip service is given to the notion of healthy public policy, editors of health-research journals often have difficulty seeing findings with implications for the justice, housing, employment, or immigration sectors as relevant to health research. Despite these challenges, in my judgement findings from research with a social determinants orientation offer us the best chance for understandCJNR 2006,Vol. 38 No 1, 3–5 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 38 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://cjnr.archive.mcgill.ca/article/download/1979/1973 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
