The social emergence of health : a theoretical interpretation and empirical application of Pierre Bourdieu's relational theory of social action in a three-dimensional Canadian field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social action has been the inspiration for an array of diverse health studies seeking to better understand the nature of social stratification and its relation to health behaviours and outcomes. While several of his well-known theoretical concepts, such as social capital, cultural capital and habitus, have garnered a great deal of attention in the health research community, the nature of their application has for the most part been limited to deterministic schemas examining relationships between social position and social action. There are as yet no health-related studies that offer a comprehensive theoretical account of Bourdieu’s ‘constructivist structuralism,’ incorporating all of his theoretical conceptions of field, habitus, capital, doxa and time. In light of these theoretical and empirical oversights, I offer a health-relevant re-envisioning of Bourdieu's expansive body of work and examine the implications of his relational framework for health research. Drawing upon a relational exploratory analytic method called multiple correspondence analysis and using original Canadian survey data from Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, I translate my interpretation of Bourdieu’s theoretical principles into a thoroughly Bourdieusian empirical depiction of a health-relevant three-dimensional geometric social space. The visual mapping of social space revealed seven different groupings of individuals whose common attributes and dispositions are socially patterned around health-related behaviours and outcomes, illuminating distinct spaces of social differentiation within which healthy and unhealthy individuals are located.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".