Search

'Risk' and 'risk behaviour' have become keywords in discourses about AIDS. Notions of risk behaviour in the field of HIV prevention and the addictions largely derive from epidemiological categorisations which have had a key role in constructing lay and scientific understandings of the 'problems' of AIDS and injecting drug use. This has encouraged a restricted vision which inadequately captures risk as it is understood and experienced by drug users themselves. Drawing on case examples from qualitative research with illicit drug users, this paper explores the utility of current theories of risk behaviour in understanding how risk behaviour is socially organised. Two key developments in risk behaviour theory are examined. These are situated rationality and social action theories. Findings illustrate that situated rationality theories tend to be conceptually limited to an analysis of individual rationality which fails to capture the distribution and influence of power in negotiated actions and the habituated nature of risk behaviour. In contrast, social action theories aim to understand the interplay of social factors which give rise to individuals' situated risk perceptions and actions. Findings highlight the important role that qualitative research plays in questioning, as well as complementing, dominant scientific constructions of risk. Future theories of risk behaviour in the field of HIV prevention, as well as other health domains, need to consider risk as a socially organised rather than individual phenomenon. The paper concludes by asserting that understanding what risk actually means to participants themselves provides the necessary data for public health interventions to create the conditions where risk reduction becomes possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand better the media practices of people who are directly affected by an illness or health problem. Internet sites that have been created by people with HIV/AIDS are examined as a strategy for self-representation. This analysis identifies four prominent 'organising themes' in Internet sites: autobiography; expertise; self promotion; and dissent. It is argued that there is a connection between media activism within the contemporary AIDS movement and Internet use among people with HIV/AIDS. This paper discusses the potential of the Internet, as a form of media activism, to raise the private troubles of people with health problems as public issues through a revitalisation of the public sphere in contemporary post-industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with chronic or terminal diseases not only have to face the biophysical consequences but also the social impact of illness. The social impact or stigma associated with HIV/AIDS is high due to its infectivity and association with deviant behaviour. Social interaction with health professionals is critical for subsequent social adjustment to possession of a discreditable disease, including HIV. This paper examines the subjective reports of 61 people with HIV within this context and identifies processes of stigmatisation in health care settings. In agreement with surveys of health care workers, fear of contagion is identified as the principal source of negative reactions towards people with HIV in health care settings. Issues of confidentiality and the response of people with HIV to stigma in health care settings are also discussed. It is concluded that, although the biomedical model in which health professionals are trained ignores the social impact of disease, HIV-related stigma in health care settings in Scotland is declining as health professionals become familiar with treating people with HIV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest amongst social researchers in enquiry related to lay beliefs about HIV infection and AIDS. Research of this kind is important not only theoretically, in that it may help us to understand more clearly the interface between professional and lay beliefs about health and illness, but also practically, in that it may lead to more effective policy interventions. This paper reports on findings from a series of in-depth interviews carried out with young people participating in local authority and voluntary sector youth provision and in youth training schemes. It identifies lay beliefs about the nature, causes and origins of AIDS amongst young people in lesbian and gay youth groups, and contrasts these with the beliefs of young people in undifferentiated forms of youth provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invisibilisation of social groups in health research and survey data is a source of medical uncertainty, long seen as a hallmark of the medical field. However, scholarship has not thoroughly assessed how medical uncertainty is structured by state‐level processes and global health agendas, especially for people beyond the Global North. This article introduces invisibilised uncertainty as a type of medical uncertainty structured by global organisational and state‐level priorities, which can invisibilise social groups and health problems from research and data collection, exacerbating medical uncertainty and health disparities for people worldwide. Based on 14 months of fieldwork in Thailand and in‐depth interviews with 62 participants, the article illuminates how state‐level processes and global clinical research agendas have structured knowledge gaps and uncertainties for Thai transgender women. As omissions in health research and data collection become embodied on a world scale, the article expands our understandings of how gendered health disparities are structured nationally and globally. It advances a sociology of medical ignorance by analysing the uneven landscape of holistic transgender health research, parsing how institutional dynamics can prioritise or invisibilise people and health issues in research and data, and structure uncertainties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breastmilk is a transmission source of HIV. Therefore, mothers living with HIV are able to avoid exposing their infants to HIV‐contaminated breastmilk if they replacement feed them. This article draws on an ethnographic study of an acute National Health Service HIV specialist antenatal clinic in London and explores the ontological multiple HIVs that the practice of replacement feeding takes part in enacting within the fluid space of the HIV diaspora. The term articulates the circumstances of racialised people affected by HIV who are originally from countries where access to life sustaining medication, care and resources—that enable a decoupling of the illness from death—are not readily accessible, and who have (temporarily) relocated themselves to geographical places where these resources are on offer. Arguing that Black African and Caribbean migrant women's ability to benefit from the technologies and care that have turned HIV into a chronic illness in England is delimited by race and their diasporic positionality. In so doing, the article contributes to Sociology by showing how race is part of practice–ethnographic research and medical care even when it is seemingly absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with civil society actors in the AIDS Service Organization (ASO) sector in Canada, this article explores how these actors contribute to shaping the illness identities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the shadow of efforts to criminalize exposure to HIV. While the biographically disruptive qualities associated with an HIV diagnosis have been addressed in the medical sociology literature, we turn our attention to the key role played by ASOs as interlocutors in this process. Paying specific attention to the intersection of processes of medicalization and criminalization, we ask how they are re‐stigmatizing a condition that has shifted in the public consciousness from its earlier association with deviance and moral culpability. One important implication of our findings concerns the need to take greater account of how the illness identity and experience can be shaped by a 'biography of telling', of a renewed pressure to disclose intimate details of one's health status as a way to perform responsible practices of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While several recent sociological studies have sought to examine the reasons why people tend not to perceive themselves at personal threat of HIV infection, few have been explicitly directed at understanding the reasoning behind the decision to seek HIV antibody testing. This paper presents the findings from semi-structured interviews carried out with adults living in Sydney who had had one or more HIV tests. Aspects relating to the socio-cultural dimensions of the HIV test for those who have experienced it are discussed, including representations of HIV/AIDS in mass media education campaigns, assessment of partners and notions of HIV risk and contagion in the context of embodiment in the age of epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data reported here is part of a larger study exploring the impact of HIV/At[DS on health care professionals. In this segment of the study, participants (16 nurses, 5 doctors and 3 social workers), from three hospital AIDS units were interviewed about the difficulties inherent in their work. Analysis of the transcript data indicated that the areas causing the greatest conflict and concern were those surrounding the management of dying patients. A category identified in the data was the disagreement about patient treatment Non-medical staff in one unit reported stress, frustration and conflicts about the decision making process with dying patients and expressed their discontent with the biomedical model of health care delivery. In contrast, staff in the other two units, reported satisfaction with the management of patients and relief that patients were not 'pushed' to be treated. Accordingly, a model of care which focuses on the patient's needs and encourages a team approach to decision-making, is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the views of the editor on the issue of AIDS as an area of study and his justification for publishing a special issue of the journal "Sociology of Health & Illness," on the subject. The author makes the observation that AIDS as a disease syndrome has a variety of etiological and clinical features which make both public and private responses problematic. It is suggested that research in this field is necessary because it has provoked an unusually strong combination of, on the one hand, universal lip-service in policy circles to the importance of the social sciences, and on the other, a notable reluctance to take their contribution seriously. It is notable that the methods of social science have been specially downgraded in this area. Acknowledging the contribution, the author opines that this is the only health problem where government has taken an active role, often seeming to be impelled by non-health consideration, in the control of health education initiatives?