Silencing critique in the health field (original) (raw)
Related papers
Integrating the Social Sciences and Humanities in the Canadian Institutes for Health Research
1999
Recent attempts to integrate the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in funding for interdisciplinary research have been challenged by a number of barriers. In funding programmes, such as the EU Horizon 2020, the SSH are absent in most calls for contributions. This article revisits the main policy drivers for embedding SSH research in interdisciplinary research. By analysing recent policy initiatives, the article shows how policymakers across the world continue to be ambivalent regarding the role of the SSH. While many stakeholders acknowledge the need to integrate SSH research in solving key societal challenges, such as climate change, migration or national security, funding for SSH is limited and tends to focus on strategic interventions and instrumental solutions. By accounting for the diversity of interdisciplinary collaborations the article recommends a more contextsensitive approach to research funding, which acknowledges the heterogeneity and volatility of research across different knowledge environments. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on the concept of interdisciplinarity.
In 2009, Canadian social science research funding underwent a transition. Social science health-research was shifted from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), an agency previously dominated by natural and medical science. This paper examines the role of health-research funding structures in legitimizing and/or delimiting what counts as ‘good’ social science health research. Engaging Gieryn’s (1983) notion of ‘boundary-work’ and interviews with qualitative social science graduate students, it investigates how applicants developed proposals for CIHR. Findings show that despite claiming to be interdisciplinary, the practical mechanisms through which CIHR funding is distributed reinforce rigid boundaries of what counts as legitimate health research. These boundaries are reinforced by applicants who felt pressure to prioritize what they perceived was what funders wanted (accommodating natural-science research culture), resulting in erased, elided, and disguised social science theories and methods common for ‘good social science.’ Résumé. En 2009, le financement de la recherche sociale au Canada a subi une période de transition au niveau de sa structure. Dorénavant, la recherche sociale en santé, qui auparavant était éligible au financement du Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines (CRSH), est admissible qu’au financement des Instituts en recherche en santé du Canada (IRSC), un organisme initialement dominé par les sciences naturelles et médicales. Cette recherche explore le rôle des structures de financement des recherches en santé dans la légitimation et/ou la délimitation de ce qui est considéré comme de la ‘bonne’ recherche en sciences sociales. Me basant sur la notion de ‘boundary-work’, formulé par Gieryn (1983), et sur des entrevues réalisées auprès d’étudiants en recherche qualitative des cycles supérieurs en sciences sociales, j’examine la manière dont les candidats ont développé leur projet de recherche pour les IRSC. Les résultats démontrent que bien qu’ils se présentent comme interdisciplinaires, les mécanismes pratiques à travers lesquels les IRSC distribuent leur financement renforcent la délimitation de ce qui est considéré comme de la recherche légitime en sciences sociales. Cette délimitation est renforcée par les candidats qui se sentaient obligés de prioriser ce qui leur paraissait être les demandes des bailleurs de fonds (répondre à la culture de recherche en sciences naturelles), se traduisant par l’effacement, l’omission, et le déguisement des théories et méthodes en sciences sociales courants dans de ‘bonnes recherches en sciences sociales.’
Integrating Health Services Research into CIHR
·. The Canadian health system has grown in complexity in recent decades, making it ever more imperative to organize and manage the system to ensure Canadians' access to effective health services at an affordable cost to society. Health services research is a policy-oriented field that draws on disciplines across the social sciences, health sciences, natural sciences, humanities, law and business. It can make a crucial contribution to CIHR's transformative vision for a new integrative, collaborative approach to Canadian health research, research that will improve the health and well-being of Canadians. Health services research complements biomedical and clinical research. ·. Biomedical and clinical advances are of little value if the health care system is not organized, funded, and financed in a way that ensures those in need have access to new, cost-effective services. Reciprocally, over time a well-run health care system is of limited value if it cannot accommodate underlying advances in health care services for Canadians. Each area of research will realize its potential contribution to the health and well-being of Canadians only alongside strong programmes of research in the other areas. Health services research involves basic and applied research. ·. Health services research provides the link between basic disciplinary research and applied health research. It is the interdisciplinary staging ground for bringing basic non-health research advances in theory and methods from disciplines (e.g., economics, sociology) to bear on specific, applied health research issues (e.g., hypertension, waiting lists, resource allocation). Integrating health services research as a cross-cutting theme. ·. The planning documents for CIHR recognize the crucial role of health services research as a cross-cutting theme. Regardless of the specific institutes named, because each will pursue research pertaining to health care, there will be a role for applied health services research. There is already a significant and growing demand to integrate health services research perspectives into a wide range of health research areas, particularly clinical areas such as cancer, internal medicine, etc. But its penetration remains uneven and further integration as a cross-cutting theme should be nurtured through CIHR. Integration through an Institute for Health Services Research. For health services research, the crosscutting and institute-based approaches to integrative approaches are not substitutes; they are complements. ·. Health services research will thrive as a cross-cutting perspective only in the presence of an institute that supports the development of basic health service research methods and analytic frameworks applied in research across institutes, and that supports the career development of new health services researchers.
Members' of Parliament knowledge of and attitudes toward health research and funding
Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2007
O ver the past 8 years, health research has been an important but declining priority for the federal government. The development of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Research Chairs, Genome Canada, the Networks of Centres of Excellence, the Canadian Health Services Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) 1 reflects this initial interest. Although most of these programs receive multi-year funding, CIHR receives annual funding from the federal government. However, its annual increases have not risen proportionately with the number of requests for funding it receives each year. CIHR is the federal funding body for health research and consists of 13 institutes. It supports 4 pillars of research: biomedical research, clinical research, social and cultural aspects of health and population health research, and health services and systems research. With the formation of CIHR, 2 federal funding for health research increased from 289millionin2000to289 million in 2000 to 289millionin2000to553 million in 2002, with subsequent 5%-6% annual increases until 2006. That year, the increase was 2.4%. 3 The initial increases in funding stimulated a sharp rise in the number of grants submitted and funded annually. In the 2006 competition, the increase in funding was lower than expected and the success rate in the open compe
2018
We offer a UK-based commentary on the recent " Perspective " published in IJHPM by Thakkar and Sullivan. We are sympathetic to the authors' call for increased funding for health service and policy research (HSPR). However, we point out that increasing that investment – in any of the three countries they compare: Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom– will ipso facto not necessarily lead to any better use of research by health system decision-makers in these settings. We cite previous authors' descriptions of the many factors that tend to make the worlds of researchers and decision-makers into " two solitudes. " And we call for changes in the structure and funding of HSPR, particularly the incentives now in place for purely academic publishing, to tackle a widespread reality: most published research in HSPR, as in other applied fields of science, is never read or used by the vast majority of decision-makers, working out in the " real world. "
Social scientists in the health research field: A clash of epistemic habitus
While science policymakers and university administrators in Canada have been pushing interdisciplinary research and greater collaboration between the social sciences, humanities and health research, social scientists and humanists face several cultural and material hurdles that limit their ability to participate fully in the health research field. In this chapter, we use neo-institutionalist theory and Pierre Bourdieu's social theory to shed light on these challenges. We argue, based on institutional data and qualitative interviews with social scientists and humanists in medicine-related programs, that merely wishing for successful interdisciplinarity does not erase the tensions between different doxa (i.e. field logics) and leads to decoupling. Our research suggests that for social scientists and humanists to succeed in the health research fields, they often have to adapt to their new field and transform their work to align with the doxa of medicine. This necessary adaptation c...
Promoting equitable global health research: a policy analysis of the Canadian funding landscape
Health research policy and systems, 2017
Recognising radical shifts in the global health research (GHR) environment, participants in a 2013 deliberative dialogue called for careful consideration of equity-centred principles that should inform Canadian funding polices. This study examined the existing funding structures and policies of Canadian and international funders to inform the future design of a responsive GHR funding landscape. We used a three-pronged analytical framework to review the ideas, interests and institutions implicated in publically accessible documents relevant to GHR funding. These data included published literature and organisational documents (e.g. strategic plans, progress reports, granting policies) from Canadian and other comparator funders. We then used a deliberative approach to develop recommendations with the research team, advisors, industry informants and low- and middle-income country (LMIC) partners. In Canada, major GHR funders invest an estimated CA$90 M per annum; however, the post-2008 ...