098 - Special Session. Sociology in and Sociology of Prevention

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Abstract

“Prevention” has become an ascendant concept in the U.S., and throughout the West. While there have long been notions of prevention being better than cure, institutional support for prevention, as well as its resonance among both elites and publics, has grown dramatically in recent years. The emphasis on prevention in public policy may be best illustrated by the inclusion of major provisions related to prevention in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.
Sociologists have a great deal to contribute to policy, practice, and research related to prevention. Despite this, we argue that an intentional focus on prevention, as a whole, has been largely absent from sociological thought and research. This panel will showcase the varied work of sociologists in the area of prevention of health and illness, and promotion of health, broadly construed. Building on Robert Strauss’s conception of sociology in, and sociology of, medicine (1957), this session will explore sociology in, and sociology of, prevention. Papers on sociology in prevention will focus on such areas as sociological approaches to understanding the emergence and distribution of health and illness (e.g., sociology’s focus on structural, versus individual, determinants), and to addressing structural factors in order to promote health and prevent disease (e.g., community organizing, policy change, social movements). Papers on sociology of prevention will focus on critical sociological accounts of the field (e.g., public health as a field of practice; social movements around health and illness).
The goal for this session is not only to provide broad exposure for the wide variety of sociological work being conducted related to prevention, but to also serve as a catalyst for efforts to theorize and systematize sociological approaches to prevention, and to create capacity for scholarship that bridges the academic/applied divide.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizers

• Mark Wolfson, Wake Forest University

• Katherine Clegg Smith, Johns Hopkins University

Presider

• Mark Wolfson, Wake Forest University

Individual Presentations

• Using Sociology to Inform Public Health Prevention Research and Policy - Paula M. Lantz, University of Michigan

• Sociologists Collaborating with Environmental Health Scientists to Prevent Exposure and Disease - Phil Brown, Northeastern University

• Prevention and Contention: Vaccine Skeptics, Alternative Medicine, and School Immunization Exemptions - Edward T. Walker, University of California-Los Angeles

• Can a Sociology of Community Risk and Protective Factors Improve the Lives of Children and Adolescents? - Richard F. Catalano, Jr., University of Washington

Discussant

• Katherine Clegg Smith, Johns Hopkins University