Health Promotion and the Personal
Conduct of (Everyday) Life
Kasper A. Kristensen
Research Centre for Health Promotion
Assistant Professor, PhD
Roskilde University
kak@ruc.dk
Main Points
 THE RISING FIELD OF HEALTH PROMOTION
 RESEARCHING HEALTH AND PRACTICES OF HEALTH
PROMOTION IN EVERYDAY LIFE
 POINTS OF CONCERN
THE RISING FIELD OF HEALTH
PROMOTION
 A historical surge in concepts and practices of health
 Moral and political debates
 Core institutions
 Ways of life
 Forms of subejctivity
 Put into practice
 Policies
 Organizational changes
 Health Care
 Private market of health goods and services
 Intimate evaluation of self and others
 Individual strategies for health
“Health” as a contested concept
 The greater good?
 Medicine, hygiene and social planning
 Suspect?
 Power/Knowledge
 Inequality, exclusion and domination
 Government/Regulation
 Technological, rational and individualized reasoning
 Battlefield of the bodies and of the selves
Absence of disease
 historical influence of the medical science
 Pathogenic perspective (Antonovsky)
 Biomedicine (Rose)
A ”positive” health concept
 The good life, care for the self (philosophical/religious)
 “A complete state of well-being” (UN, 1946)
 Antonovsky: Salutogenesis
 Life quality
”A ressource for everyday life”
 Health:
“To reach a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, an
individual or group must be able to identify and to realize aspirations, to
satisfy needs, and to change or cope with the environment. Health is,
therefore, seen as a resource for everyday life, not the objective for living.
Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources,
as well as physical capacities.” (Ottawa Charter; WHO, 1986)
 Health Promotion:
“Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over,
and to improve, their health….[] Therefore, health promotion is not just
the responsibility of the health sector, but goes beyond healthy life styles to
well being “ (Ottawa Charter; WHO, 1986)
Practice and theory in health
promotion
 Field of Practice
 Field of Theory
(McQueen)
 Policy Area
 Perspective/Orientation
 Micro
 Pragmatic
 Individual
 Behavioral, cognitive
 Administrative, community
 Macro
 Community, national
Researching health and practices of
health promotion in everyday life
 Where the individual engages with the social world
 Domain of subjective experience and activity
 The domain of reproductive/productive life processes
 Social cultural patterns of activities
 Ctr:



Health behavior
Health Habits
Lifestyle
 The domain of the practitioner
 Where practices are received and have an impact
 A place for critique/counteractivity
Points of concern
 The question of perspective?
 The question of participation?
 The question of scale?
 The assumption of regularity?
The question of perspective
 Privileged observer?
 1st person perspectives
 embodied experience
 Chronic pain
 Capacity to reach individual goals (Wackerhausen, 1994)
The question of participation
 Participation in social structures of practice (Dreier, 2009)
 Ressource for everyday living:
 Manage social participation
 Stress
 Psychosocial conflicts
 Mental health
 Participation
 Resources, social rights, recognitions
The question of scale
Time:
 24/7 timescale
 The social reproduction, social organization, rituals
 Growth and production
 Experiences, activities over larger timescales
 - competencies
 - struggles
 - illness
 - recovery/rehabilitation
 Subjective horizon of significance
The question of scale II
Space:
 The place-/setting-/institutionbound
 Local, immediate, context
 Mobility
 Disability
 Being in place/moving in and through places
 Migration
 Pathways to marginalization
The assumption of regularity
 Routine
 Habit
 Taken for granted
 Projects!
 Life long learning
 Career
 Success/failure
 Health promotion:
 Making everyday life into a project!
 Sustaining change after the project
The personal conduct of life
 The personal conduct of life (Holzkamp, 1998, Dreier, 2008,
Kristensen, 2008)
 Building a theory and methodology that researches health and
practices of health promotion in peoples lives from a
 1st person perspective
 Participation in social structures of practice
 following experiences and activities of growth and learning over
time and space
 Projects, variations and conflicts in daily life
A worst case scenario?
 Expert privileged perspective
 Locally confined
 24/7 discipline
 Individualized
 Habitual/Regularity