Doing health – an ethnographic study on nurturing practices from pregnancy through the first year of childhood (DOING HEALTH)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christine Holmberg
• Subject Area: Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409800133

Health literacy (HL) is embedded within broader social and environmental contexts and influenced through situational and personal determinants. HL is situated at the nexus of the structural and the biographical. Designed as an ethnographic study, WP4-Doing Health explores HL as it unfolds in the everyday lives of young families through a social health lens and with specific attention to early childhood allergy prevention (ECAP). Social health stresses how health practices are performed in social life across local, structural and biographical levels and crucially (re)made in and through care. Young families are defined here as a pregnant person and their partners, and/or persons with children under one year. Our study aims are to (1) to analyze how different forms of knowledge come together to shape the nurturing practices of young families as they negotiate ECAP; (2) to describe the complex social, ecological, and systemic forces within which 'health' and health practices are embedded, and trace how expert knowledge is reflected in or transformed by other forms of knowledge; and (3) to enrich understanding of how medical information, ECAP guidelines, and tacit, everyday knowledge interact in structuring families' habitual nurturing practices. To achieve these aims, the ethnographic study works together with professionals and young families in three different settings; a superdiverse, an affluent urban area, and a rural, deprived area. WP4-Doing Health explores ECAP as a complicated issue of many intermingled concerns, and embeddedness in everyday routines and patterns, where do-abilities, in the sense of practicality and social and cultural appropriateness of the practice, is decided. Such analysis holds the promise of illuminating how (or how not) and why (or why not) families practice and develop ECAP HL. It has a strong connection with WP3-health professionals, WP5-Users Needs, and WP6-Epidemiology. WP4-Doing Health compliments these by empirically researching why, when, and where parents seek health information and how that information is enacted into practice. Findings from WP4-Doing Health will provide critical insights that might enhance understanding of the barriers and facilitators encountered in ECAP knowledge translation in order to more robustly understand how scientific evidence is filtered and adapted by users based on their habits, cultural frames, and embodied forms of knowledge.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2959: Health literacy in early childhood allergy prevention: parental competencies and public health context in a shifting evidence landscape (HELICAP)
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Sarah Nettleton, Ph.D.