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Sharon Bennett

Publications and source records attributed to Sharon Bennett.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

What makes a good family-centered partnership between women and their practitioners? A qualitative study.

BACKGROUND: Family-centered maternity care is an approach based on mutually beneficial partnerships between health care providers and families. It offers new ways of thinking about the relationship among childbearing women, their families, and health caregivers. This study was designed to identify health care practices that promoted or limited a family-centered philosophy. METHODS: A qualitative design, using reflexive interviews and focus groups, investigated the perspectives of 34, primarily African American women who used maternity services at a large urban hospital; some women traveled from rural areas for delivery. Inductive data analysis was conducted on the transcribed audiotapes of the interviews and groups. RESULTS: Barriers to family-centered maternity care were categorized as issues in coordination of services among health caregivers, patient-health caregiver relationships and systems, and access to services. Facilitators of family-centered maternity care were identified as perceived response to high-risk patients, health-related support outside the hospital, and special resources. Narratives, or personal stories told by the women, were used to illustrate barriers and facilitators. CONCLUSIONS: Education about family-centered maternity care is vitally important for health caregivers. In clinical situations, each childbearing woman and her family should be treated as if they are extraordinary. In this way, practitioners can alter routines that cause the woman and her family to lose individualized care.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

A proper place to live: health inequalities, agency and the normative dimensions of space.

This paper explores the links between lay knowledge, place and health related social action (or agency) at the individual and collective level. It is based on an analysis of in-depth interviews and neighbourhood survey data across four localities in two cities in the North West of England.The qualitative analysis has identified 'guidelines' that we argue provide socially shared understandings of the normative contours of 'proper places' which shape the way people respond to the everyday lived reality of places. The quantitative findings suggest that a substantial minority of people, particularly in disadvantaged areas, are exposed to significant dissonance between the normative dimensions and lived experience of place. The analysis points to potential interactions between individual and collective action which may affect the health of individuals and populations and 'ontological fit'-people's ability to (re) construct a positive identity despite living in what they and others perceive to be an 'improper' place. This is linked to their biographical connections with particular places and the extent to which they can localise problems and people in places at a distance from themselves. The paper contributes to understanding about the processes that generate inequalities in the health experience of people living in sharply contrasting socio-economic circumstances as well as finer-grained health inequalities between the 'poor' and the 'poorest'.

England↗
PubMed2003

Beyond 'beer, fags, egg and chips'? Exploring lay understandings of social inequalities in health.

This paper seeks to contribute to the limited body of work that has directly explored lay understandings of the causes of health inequalities. Using both quantitative and qualitative methodology, the views of people living in contrasting socio-economic neighbourhoods are compared. The findings support previous research in suggesting that lay theories about causality in relation to health inequalities, like lay concepts of health and illness in general, are multi-factorial. The findings, however, also illustrate how the ways in which questions about health and illness are asked shape people's responses. In the survey reported on here people had no problem offering explanations for health inequalities and, in response to a question asking specifically about area differences in health experience, people living in disadvantaged areas 'constructed' explanations which included, but went beyond, individualistic factors to encompass structural explanations that gave prominence to aspects of 'place'. In contrast, within the context of in-depth interviews, people living in disadvantaged areas were reluctant to accept the existence of health inequalities highlighting the moral dilemmas such questions pose for people living in poor material circumstances. While resisting the notion of health inequalities, however, in in-depth interviews the same people provided vivid accounts of the way in which inequalities in material circumstances have an adverse impact upon health. The paper highlights ways in which different methodologies provide different and not necessarily complementary understandings of lay perspectives on the causes of inequalities in health.

England↗