Summary
Contents
Key Concepts in Health Studies provides a much needed guide to the central concepts used across the subject, and offers the reader a comprehensive overview of the core topics, theories and debates. Drawing together the fundamentals within the disciplines of health, nursing, and social policy this book is an ideal text both for students studying health in a range of academic fields, and for health and social care practitioners. From ageism to public health, and gender to obesity, the book offers an exciting guide to the multidisciplinary field.
Quality of Life Measures
Quality of Life Measures
The concept of ‘quality of life’ can be found in two distinct areas of health and social research. The first has its origins in early twentieth-century eugenics, and was used as a descriptive assessment of presumed life patterns resulting from a chronic condition, in particular, infants with severe disabilities. These assessments combined clinical judgement (including moral and social concerns) with a set of economic rationale in order to establish a systematic case for non-treatment of those whose physical and cognitive abilities differed from the norm (Koch, 2000: 420). The second, more socially-orientated conception of quality of life first emerged in the 1920s and was utilized in order to consider social concerns about the general life or ‘social health’ ...