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Well-being and Health Research Group
Academic research has intrinsic value – people want to understand how the social world works – but it is also desirable to determine how the insights our research produces might contribute to improvement in people’s quality of life.
Most sociologists would accept this premise. But in many cases one’s efforts to act on it are limited to a brief policy suggestion or two at the end of a research article. The Well-Being and Health Research Group is committed to going further, to making implications for well-being a systematic focus of our research.
One way to do this is to make explicit the normative positions underlying the various practical or policy implications one derives from one’s research. Often the normative element remains implicit or, at best, is treated as a matter of common sense. Of course, common sense sometimes gets it right. But one of the reasons one does research in the first place is that, for the chosen topic, common sense is evidently insufficient – or sometimes even misleading – for a good understanding of how the social world works. To believe (implicitly) that common sense is sufficient for developing a set of practical implications therefore stands as an unfortunate contrast to the effort devoted to the research itself.
In a broader sense, the work of this research group is consistent to a certain extent with a recent shift in the intellectual landscape of the social sciences, illustrated in the development of 'positive psychology', and in the shift from 'medical sociology' to the 'sociology of health' which began in the 1990s. Traditionally, the social sciences have focused their attention on the vast range of dysfunction in social structures and behaviours. Sociology’s core concepts included alienation and anomie, and one commonly locates the 'genesis' of sociology itself in the wrenching dislocations of modernisation resulting in the breakdown of communities.
Concerns of that type are of course still entirely relevant, since what contributes to well-being is typically conceptualised as the converse of what contributes to 'ill-being'. For example, if societal inequality generates mental and physical illness, then the obvious implication is that greater equality will be associated with improved health, by raising the health of the most deprived. However, it is also possible to look 'positively' at how health and well-being are fostered even amongst the very worst off through the sociological lens of resilience and social support. So rather than investigating only the difficulties people face, numerous researchers across the social sciences are now engaged in the direct study of what contributes to human well-being. Economists and psychologists in particular have developed a large body of research in the field of 'happiness studies'. A more diffuse group of researchers situate their work under the heading of 'quality of life'.
Sociologists have been more hesitant about work in this mode; there is particular scepticism among UK sociologists regarding happiness studies (though there is a Happiness Study Group in the British Sociological Association). Given this stance, the Well-Being and Health Research Group takes the view that there is therefore a genuine opportunity to make a transformative empirical and theoretical contribution to sociology at both a national and international level.
WBHRG sponsored events
2011
A number of speakers on aspects of Well-being and Health (Dr Tim Brown and others TBC) organised by WBHRG form part of the Departmental Seminar Series this semester.
Submissions are now welcomed for a day conference on 'Happiness and Wellbeing: Advancing the Contribution of Sociology' with keynote speaker Ruut Veenhoven which will take place here at Leicester on 23 September 2011. Find out more.
2010
A number of speakers on aspects of Well-being and Health (Prof Graeme Currie, Dr Edmund Chattoe-Brown) organised by WBHRG form part of the Departmental Seminar Series this semester.
