 Assignments of meaning in epidemiologyMiles Little Social Science & Medicine, 1998, vol. 47, issue 9, 1135-1145 Abstract: Epidemiology works in a public domain, gathering the results of surveys and trials into forms of knowledge which are made available to many stakeholders. Health policy makers, lawyers, the media, medical technology companies, and those who use and deliver health services all have legitimate interests in epidemiology. There is unfortunately no common language in which each of these stakeholders can express their interest in the outcomes of epidemiological studies. The largest and most important gap exists between those who use computational data and those who use cultural and linguistic models to generate their explanations. Methods have been described, however, which allow the identification of all legitimate stakeholders before epidemiological studies are undertaken. Identifying the stakeholders, however, will serve no purpose unless there is a prior commitment by epidemiologists to respect both reductionist and narrative accounts of truth. Keywords: epidemiology; stakeholders; narrative; analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:47:y:1998:i:9:p:1135-1145 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.