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In this paper, we examine how New Zealand children engage with public health agendas that seek to shape their understandings of health. We shed light on the ways children make sense of what they see, hear and come to know through public health ‘work’, and consider what effects this has for how they come to think of their ‘selves’ and relations with others. We pay attention to the way public health messages assemble, bolstered by dispositions, behaviours and ruminations expressed in schools, families and communities. Children’s talk exemplifies the sheer volume of public health missives saturating their worlds and the range of media used to reach into children’s lives. In many cases, children are ‘doing it for themselves’ in the sense that they are attempting to enact health imperatives about healthy eating, regular exercise and weight management. However, alongside the willingness of many to simply believe and enact health information, we draw attention to the capacity of some children to think through public health messages, negotiate and make sense of them in relation to their own lives. Despite the ubiquity and mantra-like quality of public health messages currently directed at children we contend they are variously interpreted and embedded in children’s lives. We regard the messiness and complexity of children’s engagement as affirmation that a critically informed variety of public health could provide opportunities for children to come to know health as more than simply eating the right foods and running a lot. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Māori and Pacific Peoples experience a disproportionate burden of alcohol-related harm relative to other ethnic groups, yet little is known about the context in which this drinking occurs. Few studies have explored how and why young Māori and Pacific women drink. Therefore, this article aims to develop a more nuanced and detailed account of Māori and Pacific young women’s drinking practices. The following article reports on an ethnographic study of young Māori and Pacific women aged 18–30. Five Māori participants and six Pacific participants were selected and asked to become researchers within their social groups. Nine female researchers also became participants in the study, accompanying recruited participants to drinking occasions and events. Participants were each given a ‘drinking diary’ to document drinking occasions, which formed the data-set for the project. Three levels of thematic analysis were undertaken. The first noted broad themes with the second and third levels exploring more nuanced themes and identifying intersections across themes. The study demonstrated that Māori and Pacific young women’s engagement with New Zealand’s culture of intoxication is complex: Māori and Pacific women drink for pleasure or to achieve a ‘buzz’ and to be social. Drinking practices are deeply affected by ethnic and peer group collectives (‘the girls’), traditions and expectations. Harm reduction initiatives need to take account of the many pathways specific to how Māori and Pacific young women engage with alcohol use. Additionally, the wider context in which alcohol-related harm occurs needs to be considered in policy and harm reduction debates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public health medicine is distinct in two ways from most other forms of medical specialisation; firstly, it is predominantly non-clinical and secondly, its concern is with populations, rather than the more common individual physician–patient encounter. In spite of recent attempts to ‘mainstream’ public health approaches into medical training and practice, it remains a relatively low prestige medical specialty. In the face of the centrality of all things clinical in medical training, the identity work needed to think beyond this and into population health approaches is significant. In the face of public health physicians’ subaltern position within medicine, this research investigates the identity work doctors did as they made the transition into public health medicine and how they understood their positioning once they were within the specialty. The inductive thematic analysis conducted on the qualitative interview data generated for this research elicited three key themes of relevance for the 19 public health physicians in New Zealand who were interviewed. The calling into question of biomedical identities was evident and concomitant with this was a sense of loss of the satisfactions of clinical medicine including contact with patients and the ability to solve discrete clinical problems. The final theme revolved around how public health physician identities were felt by the participants to be discredited. Lack of attention to the identity work required to think beyond the individual in health terms may contribute to a slow pace of change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A wide variety of health promotion strategies are employed which are designed to educate members of the public with the ultimate goal of gradual general cultural change and individual behaviour change. The object is a closer alignment of individual and population health-related behaviours with 'ideal' notions of what a healthy citizen might be. These campaigns are not taken up in any straightforward way, but people negotiate the messages in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Drawing on data generated in focus groups, this article explores this complexity by addressing the themes of resistance, denial and othering. This article also identifies an unintended consequence that may arise from processes of othering that may serve to reinforce stigmatisation and inequality rather than mitigating it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]