Researching Poverty, Community and Health

Abstract

Having begun to pull together diverse strands of influence on health and well-being this chapter will build on the foregoing discussions to briefly outline the theoretical and methodological framework for the East London studies drawn on in later chapters. It has been suggested that to advance understanding of health inequalities we need to look beyond social epidemiology to sociology and social policy (Graham, 2001: 298) and, because social problems do not confine themselves to the pigeon holes of academic departments (Mills, 2000) the study has recourse to a wide social science base encompassing in particular sociology, social and public policy, and politics. Ethnographic methods were adopted for the empirical research, but, as Nettleton argues, observations on the minutiae of social life ‘always need to be understood in relation to broader debates about the current state and changing nature of the contemporary social world’ (Nettleton, 2007: 2410).