Programme full

Thursday 16 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 4
understandings of the role of ethnography within the sociology of healthcare quality and safety, and to explore ways in
which ethnography can be further developed as a safety improvement methodology through the application of Video-
Reflexive Ethnography (Iedema et al. 2013).
Professional Partnership around Genetic Conditions in Scotland:
Service Delivery
Seymour, T.
(University of Edinburgh)
Theorising an Integrated Approach to
Several decades of sociological work on the 'new genetics' has highlighted the importance of particular genes when it
comes to issues such as geneticized personal and collective identities, ethical dilemmas related to genetic patterns of
inheritance, and hopes for new treatments from genetic science. On the other hand, across literature on illness
experiences, chronicity, health inequalities, and disability rights, the emphasis largely falls on non-genetics aspects of
a health condition. Here the embodied aspects of living with a condition are highlighted, as well as the way that illness
is socially experienced via processes of social and financial exclusion, barriers to accessing services, and stigma from
society.
This paper will discuss findings from research on processes of partnership between different professional groups
within the Scottish healthcare arena. In particular, the focus is on the interactions between third sector and public
sector services that support individuals with complex genetic conditions such as Huntington's disease. People living
with Huntington's disease bring to the clinic the challenges they face concerning their physical and mental health.
However, these are also experiences mediated by their relationships within their kinship network and by the reactions
from the society around them. Successful professional partnerships take into account the complexity of this picture,
and acknowledge that multiple types of expertise are necessary to deliver effective services. Such findings also
highlight the need for integrated sociological theorisation on the genetic and social aspects of illness experience and
how related services should be structured.
Methodological Innovations
W324, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
Dechipering the Global Welfare Regimes.: From 'Scalar Analytics' to Cluster Analysis of Welfare State
Variations
Badescu, C.
(Institute For Quality Of Life)
The modern era induced a lateral transformation to the western European civilization so that its shape ended by being
totally different when compared with its medieval shape. Since Quattrocento on, the Western Europe changed so
deeply its shape that for a Christian of the Middle Ages it will be unrecognizable. The welfare regimes follow this
pattern of lateral transformation. Any transformational process, globalization itself being included, assumes both
specific and global features, national and lateral vectors. The specific (locally embedded) features of globalization are
so effective that we may speak along with S Sassen of the 'particular scaling of global'. Globalization, therefore, bears
upon itself a dualism, a tension induced by these contradictory processes. Our hypothesis is that the modern world
system induces contradictory scalings so that the global scaling is opposed to and spread through the filter of the
civilizational, national and sub-national scaling. We need to reconsider the relation between 'scalar analytics', as in
Sassen's approach, and cluster analysis applied to the variation of European welfare regimes. A critical examination
of theoretical and methodological aspects is requested in order to go farther toward such a complex, multidimensional
analysis. Our research project is focused on such a theoretical and methodological task.
The ‘Inter-vey’: A New Technique towards the Conversational Survey
Gobo, G.
(University of Milan)
For decades, the dilemma between open-ended and closed-ended response alternatives occupied the methodological
debate. Over the years, dominant approaches in survey have reacted to this dilemma by opting for fixed response
alternatives and the standardization of interviewer's behavior. If this methodological decision has been the survey's
fortune, making it the methodology most widely used in the social sciences, however it produces a large amount of
biases well known in the literature: misunderstanding of the response alternatives by the interviewees, the multiple
word meanings of response alternatives due the communicative functions of quantifiers, the invented opinions (or lies)
155 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University