Facing resistance to health advice

Abstract

This paper examines the possible responses for resistance to health information among women. The data are drawn from a broader qualitative study of how 60 women in Finnmark, a region of Norway, which examined how the participants responded to health information related to coffee, exercise, smoking and diet. This paper focuses on responses to health information about smoking. The study suggests that health information challenges the women's conception of their selves. This may make them take a distance to health information which then makes health information less effective.

Keywords:

• risk
• health promotion
• resistance
• face-work
• stigma
• smoking

Notes

1. That many people are ambivalent to scientific knowledge or expert knowledge because it is experienced as disputed and does not last very long before the knowledge and is exchanged with new knowledge, and that lay knowledge has also taught lay people that scientific knowledge is developed from aggregations that may not be relevant to specific individuals.

2. Beck (1992) argues that lay people have less trust in scientific knowledge in late modernity. Risk knowledge are publicly presented and disputed, producing uncertainty and acrutiny.

3. This deduction correspond with Lash (1993, 2000) who argues that people respond to risk as members of cultural subgroups rather than single individuals. Lash argues for the notion of ‘risk culture’ rather than Beck's notion ‘risk society’.