What can a socialization approach bring to the study of health inequalities?

Session 2: Capturing the incorporation of the social: socialization (sociology) and embodiment (social epidemiology)

Discussion: Anne McMunn (University College London)

Abstract

Socialization can be defined as the way in which society shapes and transforms individuals, and its study aims to provide an empirical account of the processes of sociogenesis of individual dispositions. After outlining the broad outlines of this model, and lamenting the fact that it has been little applied to the field of health, I will show its contributions to the study of very diverse pathologies, in my own work on anorexia and stroke, and more broadly in that of the Gendhi team on families of young children and their consultations with a wide spectrum of health professionals, adolescent groups and school infirmaries, patients and professionals in various services for the management of cardiovascular pathologies, colorectal cancer or dementia. Analyzing these fields as sociologists of socialization means, first and foremost, shedding light on both the social production of bodies and health, and the processes of seeking and accessing care, which differ according to how symptoms are experienced and expressed. It is then a matter of seeing relations between patients and doctors as social interactions between individuals who are socially disposed (to act as they act, and to think as they think), and showing that medical work operates on patients who are not generic individuals but who are constructed by previous socialization processes. Approaches in terms of socialization therefore provide a powerful reading grid for uncovering, in particular, the class and gender mechanisms that explain the existence and reproduction of health inequalities, and for identifying the places and modalities of action against them.

Muriel Darmon

Muriel Darmon is a sociologist and CNRS research director at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CNRS-EHESS-Paris 1), and co-director of the ERC Gendhi ("Gender Health Inequalities", Synergy 2019). She is notably the author of Devenir anorexique. Une approche sociologique (La Découverte, 2003, 2008), La Socialisation (Armand Colin, 2006, 2010, 2016, 2023), Classes préparatoires. La fabrique d'une jeunesse dominante (La Découverte, 2013, 2015), Socialization (Polity Press, 2024), as well as Réparer les cerveaux. Sociologie des pertes et des récupérations post-AVC (La Découverte, 2020). She served as president of the Association française de sociologie between 2017 and 2021, as a member of the expert group commissioned by the Conseil supérieur des programmes and the MEN to draft the new economics and social sciences programs for high school in 2018-2019, and as a member of the Haute Autorité de santé working group "Guide du parcours de santé de l'accident vasculaire cérébral (AVC)" in 2023-2024. She is a member of the editorial board of International Sociology Reviews, the journal Sociology and the Princeton University Press collection "studies in Cultural Sociology", and was a member of the editorial board of Sociological Theory (2021-2024) and the editorial board and director of Sociétés Contemporaines (2008-2024).

Anne McMunn

Anne McMunn is Professor of Social Epidemiology in the Research Department of Epidemiology & Public Health at UCL. Anne's research is concentrated on the social determinants of health within a life course epidemiological framework. More specifically, she investigates the influence on health and wellbeing of family care and unpaid care work, employment and social relationship characteristics, and she is also interested in how gender and socioeconomic position structure these associations. She is Co-Director of Equalise: ESRC Centre for Lifecourse Health and was recently PI of the EUROCARE international consortium investigating the impact of providing adult care at different stages of the life course across European countries in different care regimes.