Eleanor Covan - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Eleanor Covan

Health Care for Women International, Oct 3, 2021

Health Care for Women International, Jun 30, 2022

Health Care for Women International, Aug 2, 2020

Contemporary Sociology, May 1, 2005

Health Care for Women International, Feb 14, 2023

Health Care for Women International, Dec 2, 2021

The final issue in Volume 42 contains articles whose authors have addressed mental health. Schola... more The final issue in Volume 42 contains articles whose authors have addressed mental health. Scholars in Turkey (Aynur Kızılırmak, et al.), Iran (Hormoz Sanaeinasab, et al.) and Croatia (Eva Anđela Delale, et al.) suggest that pregnancy and the post-partum period may trigger depression, but that social support and spiritually integrated interventions may be helpful. Tania Perich and colleagues in their work with women diagnosed with bipolar disorder in Australia explain that reproductive life events in general create a sense of loss of self-agency and self-control, because the events lead to changes in many aspects of life. In the final article, Garcia and Nieto contribute to theoretical literature concerned with various profiles of gender norm conformity and how they may predict mental health outcomes. As I read the collection of articles, I reaffirm my commitment to the study of social relationships, as they predict our experiences of health. Alas, I also ponder about how depression in studies of women and mental health always seems to be central while limited social support and norms assigned to women seem to be predictive. I present the table of literature contributions to guide you as you read and learn. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399332.2021.2010476

Health Care for Women International, Sep 1, 2020

Health Care for Women International, Apr 3, 2015

Health Care for Women International, Jul 1, 2006

One of the first professional papers I wrote back in 1975 was entitled, “Dynamic Aspects of Ritua... more One of the first professional papers I wrote back in 1975 was entitled, “Dynamic Aspects of Ritual Performance: A Resource in Decline.” 1Rituals, of course, are celebrations of culture. Celebrants seize opportunities to heap deference on exemplary leaders, to reinforce what is important to them as a group. The leaders glow with pride as they get to show off their accomplishments among those who honor them. For reasons that are probably obvious, life cycle rituals include celebrants who are family members, friends, neighbors, and colleagues who celebrate the history of their relationships. The occasion of Phyllis Stern’s eightieth birthday offered us the opportunity to celebrate longevity, particularly longevity with purpose, in recognizing her contributions to education and to mentoring others. Although I was unable to attend Phyllis’s party, I decided to do give her an honorific present, and that present became this festschrift. Phyllis, of course, is the editor emeritus of Health Care for Women International, and in this issue is a piece by Phyllis herself, who explains why she organized her own eightieth birthday party. There are also several tributes on Phyllis’s mentoring style. While they are all honoring her leadership, I chose to lead the issue with Sandra Thomas’s work because I believe it celebrates Phyllis’s contribution to Health Care for Women International. I know you will enjoy reading Sandra’s content analysis of the editorials written by Phyllis for our journal. To all the authors, thank you for honoring Phyllis by contributing to this special issue.

Health Care for Women International, Mar 1, 2023

Journal of Anthropological Research, 2005

Health Care for Women International, May 9, 2016

Health Care for Women International, Apr 29, 2022

Health Care for Women International, Mar 1, 2022

Health Care for Women International, May 3, 2020

Health Care for Women International, Jan 19, 2018

Health Care for Women International, Oct 25, 2017

I applaud the efforts of researchers published in this issue of Health Care for Women Internation... more I applaud the efforts of researchers published in this issue of Health Care for Women International for studying vulnerable women. Such populations include women with health issues and their health practitioners. Both groups are vulnerable to stigma. I am impressed by the work of Gretchen Ely and colleagues, because their trauma-informed recommendations for practice with women who receive funding for abortions makes a theoretical contribution to the literature. I think readers will agree their theory may also be applied to other vulnerable populations including imprisoned women, sex workers, women whose genitals have been mutilated, and women who have experienced intimate partner violence. After reading all these manuscripts, it is my hope that you will understand why both health care practitioners and their patients are vulnerable. What practitioners and patients have in common is they lack sufficient resources to improve women's health. Nagore Martinez-Merino and colleagues note in their review of studies of incarcerated women that globally penal institutions are androgenic as most cultures are androcentric. This fact limits both the resources available for health interventions for this population, and research evidence evaluating the few interventions that do exist. It simply is not politically correct, in many countries, to work with women in prison. Tais Cardoso Vernaglia and co-authors explain that vulnerable populations such as the crack users they studied are rarely researched because potential informants shy away from revelations to avoid greater vulnerability to stigma. The authors should be proud of their large sample of crack users in Brazil, which contained data aggregated by gender. Such data allowed them to conclude female crack users are more vulnerable than men in every area except the likelihood of being addicted to alcohol. Women had less education, were more likely to be unemployed, lacked economic resources to meet basic needs and were separated from their children. That these social conditions exist plus the knowledge that talking to the wrong persons could lead to imprisonment, make it difficult for health practitioners to engage such women in conversation. Varun Sharma and colleagues write about "predisposing and enabling factors" to predict who gets what health services among female sex workers in Andhra Pradesh, India. They argue that factors such as limited education and living in a rural community explain variation in services received, rather than a medical need for attention. Sex workers either don't know they need medical help or they cannot access help when available. Regardless of predictable factors, it is health

Health Care for Women International, Oct 3, 2017

Authors consider reproductive health in this issue of Health Care for Women International. Severa... more Authors consider reproductive health in this issue of Health Care for Women International. Several relate to the experience of pregnancy and the aftermath of birth. In three others articles, the authors address issues stemming from migration and immigration. We begin with Cheryl Ann Anderson’s article. She conducted a systematic literature review about events that happen during the birth process that endanger the mother or the infant or both. We learn from her analysis that any woman can experience post-birth trauma due to issues that are beyond her control. Anderson suggests practitioners should assess women pre-and post-partum, to minimize symptoms of subsequent psychological trauma that may otherwise last a lifetime. In the other articles about pregnancy and birth, there are both good examples of how to reduce traumatic births, and not so good examples, although discussing trauma was not the authors’ intention. Walaa Abdrabbo and Abeer M. Alrashed, in their Saudi Arabian study, provide evidence that with proper assessment, they can limit trauma that would occur otherwise in consequence of intrauterine growth restriction. Similarly, Erin Smith and colleagues, working in southern India, write about the efforts of public health practitioners who counsel women about family planning. Doing so has helped the women and the country in general to limit births and maximize resources for existing children. In contrast, Marion Alex and Joanne Whitty-Rogers discuss pregnancy complications in Haiti, where women are so poor and give birth in such squalor, that I would judge most births there to be traumatic according to Anderson’s criteria. Ana Bravo-Moreno makes a methodological contribution to the study of women’s health issues through her study in Spain of women who become single mothers by choice. As their children have been created with the assistance of artificial insemination or gamete insertion after fertilization invitro with donated sperm, the author also explores the ethical issues concerned with these reproductive practices. Regarding internal migration among Nigerian women, I was glad to see empirical data from the work of Joshua O. Akinyemi, et al. on the effect of migration on contraceptive use. The authors found internal migration status was not independently associated with contraceptive among Nigeria women when individual and contextual characteristics are controlled. Other variables such as education, wealth, and exposure to family planning information were more predictive of contraception use in

Health Care for Women International, Feb 1, 2014

As the editor of an international scholarly journal I am forever telling authors to address our i... more As the editor of an international scholarly journal I am forever telling authors to address our interdisciplinary international audience of scholars and practitioners. To be published in our journal, authors must consider what distinguishes research and practice in their parts of the world from others, especially when making recommendations for how to improve health care practices for women. Reviewing the collection of articles published in issue 35(2) of Health Care for Women International, I encourage readers to reflect on access to contextual resources for both research and practice. Doing so may bring global issues that transcend what is presented in any particular manuscript on antenatal care to the forefront. Perhaps the most unique study published herein exists only because the researchers reside in a resource rich location. Gwendolyn E. Cremers and Kathryn Graff Low report on a convenience-based, Internet study of attitudes regarding eating human placenta. Their informants were predominantly from the United States and Europe. While this study may appear luxurious in the context of limited research resources elsewhere, the problem should be of great interest to interdisciplinary scholars, especially if one considers prior research on the benefits of eating placental tissue among other animal species. Consider as well: a researcher studying antenatal care for immigrants in Canada suggests that beginning to treat chronic illnesses discovered during pregnancy will save money for the government health care system in the long run. Working in a “developed” country, Karline Wilson-Mitchell was surprised to find many instances of untreated chronic problems. Perhaps this is so because chronic illness is usually discovered prior to pregnancy in countries where access to diagnosis and treatment is normative across the life span. In another Canadian study, conducted in a tertiary, university-affiliated hospital in Montreal, Roxana Behruzi and colleagues studied the extent to which practitioners are concerned with the humanization of birth when pregnancy complications arise. This is an important question, stemming quite

Health Care for Women International, Apr 27, 2015

Almost 20 years ago I worked with a local medical research team (Cyrus Kotwall, Gary Maxwell, Deb... more Almost 20 years ago I worked with a local medical research team (Cyrus Kotwall, Gary Maxwell, Deborah L. Covington, and Paige Churchhill; Kotwall et al., 1996) to study practitioner /patient interaction as it related to decisions about how to treat breast cancer. Then, it was obvious to me that relatively few women knew what questions to ask their physicians and relatively few surgeons knew what questions to ask of their patients. Although this has been my only study related to breast cancer, my personal interest in breast cancer research remains strong as the research assault on breast cancer continues. This issue of Health Care for Women International is devoted to substantive breast cancer research. The articles include an international literature review on living with metastatic breast cancer; a study of diagnosis and treatment decisions about women in Ghana; studies about breast cancer screening in Norway and in Jordan; a study reflecting experiences of practitioners with immigrants in the United States who were originally from Central America or Mexico; a study about practitioners working with immigrants from Somalia; and finally an article about surviving breast cancer in Sweden. Collectively, researchers reveal that practitioners and patients still struggle with how to communicate with one another, and that this struggle still affects diagnostic and treatment decisions.