Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
is of the utmost importance to a range of healthcare professionals
and policy makers. However the research cited in the literature
appears to be mainly concerned with lay interpretations of what
health means. This study was undertaken to discover what health
means to a group of 4 th year pre-registration students who would
shortly be working at the coal-face of the Irish healthcare service.
This is an important and worthwhile endeavour in that it addresses
a gap in the current state of knowledge in this area. This paper will
explore what health means to pre-registration nurses based on their
responses to a questionnaire survey and a focus group discussion.
Background
Defining what health means may appear, at first sight, to be
straightforward but the fact remains that there is little or no
consensus about what corresponds to what health it does mean
(Weiss 1997). Developing an understanding of what health means
is of perennial interest to a range of researchers in the social
sciences but is of particular relevance to the disciplines of nursing,
sociology and social policy. One of the earliest researchers in this
area was Zola (1966) who investigated what health meant to a
culturally diverse sample in New York. His work was extended by
Herzlich (1973) and d’Houtant & Field (1984) working in France
while more recently Mildred Blaxter (Blaxter 1983; Blaxter 1990;
Blaxter 1997) has undertaken a number of studies in the UK to
determine what health means to a wide range of lay people.
Blaxter (1990) reports findings from the Health & Lifestyle Survey
(reporting on the views of a random sample of men and women
living in Great Britain). Her analyses demonstrate that personal
definitions of health differ according to age, gender and perceived
level of health. For example young women focus on energy, vitality
and the ability to cope while for young men the emphasis is on
physical strength and levels of fitness. However older men and
women tended to view health as related to their functional ability as
well as their state of contentment and cheerfulness. One further
finding Blaxter reports is that women of all ages often include social
relationships in their description whereas men rarely do so. Mildred
Blaxter made use of a UK nationwide large-scale random sample
(n=9003), which was repeated five years later on the same sample
which was reduced to 5352 because of ‘death and not tracing’
(1997: 784). Her findings are therefore quite robust and clearly
indicate that there was a high level of agreement that health
depended to a large extent upon personal behaviour and
circumstances.
Of particular interest for the purposes of this study was her finding
that it was ‘the more advantaged [social group] who appeared to
be, more aware of the structural factors – like income, work, their
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