Social scientists in the health research field: A clash of epistemic habitus (original) (raw)
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Social science & medicine (1982), 2015
This paper explores social scientists' and humanities (SSH) scholars' integration within the academic medical research environment. Three questions guided our investigation: Do SSH scholars adapt to the medical research environment? How do they navigate their career within a culture that may be inconsistent with their own? What strategies do they use to gain legitimacy? The study builds on three concepts: decoupling, doxa, and epistemic habitus. Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with SSH scholars working in 11 faculties of medicine across Canada. Participants were selected through purposeful and snowball sampling. The data were analyzed by thematic content analysis. For most of our participants, moving into medicine has been a challenging experience, as their research practices and views of academic excellence collided with those of medicine. In order to achieve some level of legitimacy more than half of our participants altered their research practices. ...
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.’
Interdisciplinarity and collaborative research seems to be the new creed of science policymakers, funding agencies, and university administrators in Canada. Many initiatives have been introduced to foster collaboration, both among academics and between academics and non academic organizations (e.g., Government of Canada 2001; Government of Alberta 2005; Government of Manitoba 2003; Government of Quebec 2001). Major funding agencies have engaged in restructuring processes to break down the organizational boundaries between disciplines (e.g., Government of Canada 2000; FQRSC 2003; SSHRC 2005) and several universities promote interdisciplinary research and training (e.g., McGill University 2013; University of Toronto 2012; University of Victoria 2012; University of Western Ontario 2001; York University 2005). In health research, the growing interest of policymakers in interdisciplinarity has spawned initiatives to include the social sciences. For example, the Medical Research Council o...
BioSocieties, 2010
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Evidence-based practice (EBP) has become a dominant paradigm in North American behavioral health and social service provision. Once a model of expert decision-making that asked practitioners to search through the "best available evidence" to inform their clinical decisions and select interventions, EBP is now better understood as a complex system of legitimation that designates particular methods and-by extension-their practitioners as "evidence-based." While critics worry that EBP forecloses professional discretion by imposing particular epistemic virtues of intervention science, this ethnographic case demonstrates that 1) EBP legitimates professional actors, methods, and organizations at least as much as it hampers them and 2) a wide range of "extrascientific" actors are involved in producing and legitimating the evidence of evidence-based practice, including policy makers, public and private insurers, state agencies, charitable foundations, registries and clearinghouses, health and human service organizations, and helping professionals themselves. Once we recognize the range of actors and institutions involved in basing and legitimating evidence, and the rhetorical work of tethering scientific terms to resonant political and economic discourses, we learn that there is nothing self-evident about evidence-based practice. Drawing on the social scientific study of expertise and focusing empirically on how one behavioral intervention earns and retains its status as an EBP, this study traces the trans-institutional life of evidence and the continual need to legitimate it as a base for behavioral health practice.