Public Health as Social Justice? A Qualitative Study of Public Health Policy-makers' Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: ‘Social justice’ is routinely identified as a core value for the field of public health. Yet, outside of the theoretical literature it is seldom accompanied by a robust definition or an explanation of what it requires for policy and practice. If social justice is intended to be, or ought to be, a core value in public health, its meaning and normative requirements must be understood and articulated in a way that is applicable to, and practicable for, public health policy and practice. This study takes a first step in responding to this charge by (1) exploring public health policy-makers’ perspectives on the meaning and role of social justice in their practice, (2) examining the extent to which distinct perspectives on social justice exist in different programmatic areas of public health (chronic disease prevention and public health emergency preparedness and response), and (3) analyzing these perspectives in light of existing normative social justice theory. Methods: This study involved qualitative, semi-structured interviews with public health policy-makers purposively recruited from municipal, provincial, and federal public health organizations in Canada. Twenty interviews were conducted, analyzed via thematic analysis, and subsequently interpreted in light of, and situated within the context of, normative social justice theory. Findings: Two overarching themes emerged from the interviews, in addition to three unique themes from interviews with participants involved in chronic disease prevention and three themes from those involved in public health emergency preparedness and response. Social justice was not uniformly interpreted among study participants, and the meanings and roles attributed to social justice appeared to be influenced, in part, by the perceived goals and contextual features that belong to the programmatic area of public health in which they practiced. Conclusions: The findings of this study provide an understanding of how the meaning and role of social justice is interpreted by public health policy-makers. They point to key areas in normative social justice theory where further attention ought to be directed, as well as key areas in the public health policy and practice context where normative social justice theory could enhance and refine the value’s practical interpretation and role.
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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 | 0.053 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".