John Coveney
Biographic Data
| ID | 247103 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Coveney |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Coveney |
| SIGNATURE | COVENEY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Flinders University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8237-0248 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 93 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 210 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 93 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
A typology of food assistance models
This study empirically examined food assistance models in high-income countries, categorised them into seven main types and developed a typology informed by Resource Dependence Theory. Drawing on fifty qualitative interviews with food assistance providers across multiple countries, the study compared models, focusing on recipient dignity, agency, and the model’s capacity to address chronic food insecurity. While many models remained centred on sh…
How do children perceive and understand the experience of household food insecurity? A narrative review of the literature
Continuing the conversation about strengths-based approaches and deficit discourses in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nutrition research; response to Brimblecombe et al., 2023
Exploring unequal class logics of mealtime food socialisation. An ethnography of family meals in France and Australia
Regular family mealtimes are occasions to model food consumption and have been associated with health and well-being benefits for children. This study aimed to investigate children's mealtime food socialisation in socially diverse households. Nine families from France and five from Australia were recruited, ranging from lower middle-class to upper-class positions, with children mostly between the ages of five to eight. The data is composed of the…
Family Life During and Beyond Covid-19: The Impact of Relationship Quality on Caregivers' Management of Paid Work, Caregiving, and Self-Care
This multi-method project examined how Australian caregivers navigated family life during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and subsequent impact on family health behaviours. Participants were invited to complete all three phases. In phase 1, 115 caregivers completed an online survey, focussed on 2020 experiences of COVID-19. In phase 2, 96 of the participants completed a use-of-time recall and 80 completed a dietary recall examining participants' he…
Moral Imperatives of Lockdown: Story Completion Tasks of Family Practices and Relationships in Australia during Covid-19
This article contributes to the sociology of relationships by exploring the moral imperatives that shaped perceptions and negotiations of family life during lockdowns in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified dominant discourses from an online qualitative story completion task and situate these in relation to emerging literature on the impact of pandemic-related restrictions on domestic relationships, gender relations, and labour d…
The family meal, a ritual frozen in time; an Australian grounded theory study
Family meals are recognized as an opportunity to promote the health of families. Popular discourse posits that changes to contemporary family life have made family meals harder to achieve and promotion of the ‘traditional’ family meal may be adding pressures to contemporary families. While research has been conducted on family meals over the last three decades, there is no explicit investigation of the experiences and practices of family meals ov…
The “who” and “why” of dumpster diving for food in wealthy industrialised countries – an international scoping review
Purpose Globally, around one-third of food produced is wasted and thrown into supermarket bins or dumpsters. As a result, these dumpsters have become opportunistic sources of food through dumpster diving. The authors' scoping review aimed to document the people that are dumpster diving and why these people engage in this potentially illegal practice. Design/methodology/approach A database search spanning 12 years yielded 29 articles for review. F…
Challenging deficit discourse in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nutrition and dietetics research: A critical discourse analysis
Prior to colonisation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples used detailed knowledges on food and nutrition to develop sustainable practices which supported strong and healthy ways of life. Despite this, there is often a focus in the nutrition and dietetics literature on the deficits relating to food and nutrition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, rather than the strengths. This study used a critical discourse analysis to…
Barriers and enablers to the family meal across time; a grounded theory study comparing South Australian parents’ perspectives
Family meals are positively associated with numerous beneficial health and social outcomes. Current discourse however claims that parents are faced with numerous barriers when trying to bring the family together to share a meal. Solutions for overcoming barriers to a positive shared family meal are often individualistic and do not address the systemic pressures and burdens families have faced for decades. The aim of this study was to explore the …
The Re-enchantment of Food: An Introduction
To say that humans have a profound relationship with the food they produce and eat is a mere truism. What is new derives from the recognition that in Western cultures, over time, our deep relationship with food has been replaced by a scientistic version of what we eat, and what we should eat. In many ways, this has dis-enchanted our relationship with food, in that it has rendered food as the sum total of a calculus based on vitamins, minerals, an…
Testing delay in an environment of low Covid-19 prevalence: A qualitative study of testing behaviour amongst symptomatic South Australians
South Australia has to date (October 2021) been highly successful in maintaining an aggressive suppression strategy for the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, continued success of this strategy is dependent on ongoing testing by people with symptoms of COVID-19 to identify, trace and quarantine emergent cases as soon as possible. This study sought to explore community members’ decisions about having COVID-19 testing in an environment o…
A Food Relief Charter for South Australia—Towards a Shared Vision for Pathways Out of Food Insecurity
Chronic food insecurity persists in high-income countries, leading to an entrenched need for food relief. In Australia, food relief services primarily focus on providing food to meet immediate need. To date, there has been few examples of a vision in the sector towards client outcomes and pathways out of food insecurity. In 2016, the South Australian Government commissioned research and community sector engagement to identify potential policy act…
You can’t just eat 16 teaspoons of sugar so why would you drink 16 teaspoons’ worth of sugar?”: A qualitative study of young adults’ reactions to sugary drink warning labels
Labels conveying the amount of sugar in a beverage in teaspoons were perceived as highly factual, relatable and interpretable, and as having the greatest potential to impact consumption attitudes and intentions. Further quantitative studies are required to compare the potential effectiveness of the teaspoons of sugar labels in reducing purchasing and consumption behaviour than other alternative warning labels, such as health effects or "high in" …
The value of social eating at culturally and linguistically diverse lunch clubs: A descriptive study
Sharing the load: A qualitative exploration of what mothers and fathers believe the father’s role should be in food provisioning
The Family Meal Framework: A grounded theory study conceptualising the work that underpins the family meal
The family meal has been recognised as an integral part of family life. With the positive health outcomes associated with the family meal, it has been proposed as a strategy for encouraging health-promoting behaviours. However, a detailed understanding of the physical and mental work required to execute the family meal is lacking. The aim of this research was to conduct a grounded theory study to understand the components required to successfully…
Warning labels and interpretive nutrition labels: Impact on substitution between sugar and artificially sweetened beverages, juice and water in a real-world selection task
Effective strategies to reduce free sugar intake are needed. This study examined exposure to a warning label, independently and in conjunction with a Health Star Rating (HSR) label, on the selection of commercially available cold beverages with real decision-making stakes. Participants (N = 511, 47.9% female, mean = 21.7 (SD = 6.1) years) accessed an online convenience store app via an on-campus laptop to select one of 10 beverages (5 sugar-sweet…
The health implications of distrust in the food system: Findings from the dimensions of trust in food systems scale (Dotifs scale)
The DOTIFS scale is a comprehensive, sociologically- and empirically- informed assessment of consumer trust in food systems that can be self-administered online to large populations and used to measure changes in consumer trust over time. The differences in health-related behaviours between individuals with varying levels of trust warrant further investigation
Intentions to reduce sugar-sweetened beverage consumption: The importance of perceived susceptibility to health risks
Objective: There are numerous health effects associated with excess sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption. Interventions aimed at reducing population-level consumption require understanding of the relevant barriers and facilitators. This study aimed to identify the variables with the strongest relationship with intentions to reduce SSB consumption from a suite of variables derived from the literature. Design: Random-digit dialling of landlin…
Promoting Recall and Preserving the Historical Authenticity of Data Used to Investigate Food Regulatory Policy in Australia
This article reports on research methodology used for a case study investigating public health nutrition engagement in food regulatory policy processes in Australia. It aims to explore methods used and outline a model for how researchers can promote participant recall and accuracy. A set of key documents identified as relevant to voluntary food fortification policy (VFP) were analysed using Bacchi's 'What's the problem represented to be?' approac…
Developing and Maintaining Public Trust During and Post-Covid-19: Can We Apply a Model Developed for Responding to Food Scares
Trust in public health officials and the information they provide is essential for the public uptake of preventative strategies to reduce the transmission of COVID-19. This paper discusses how a model for developing and maintaining trust in public health officials during food safety incidents and scandals might be applied to pandemic management. The model identifies ten strategies to be considered, including: transparency; development of protocol…
Expectations and everyday opportunities for building trust in the food system
Purpose Consumers’ trust in food systems is essential to their functioning and to consumers’ well-being. However, the literature exploring how food safety incidents impact consumer trust is theoretically underdeveloped. This study explores the relationship between consumers’ expectations of the food system and its actors (regulators, food industry and the media) and how these influence trust-related judgements that consumers make during a food sa…
Good and bad sugars: Australian adults’ perspectives on sugar in their diet
This study analyses the relationship between food choices and morality by exploring how Australian adults conceptualise and negotiate their sugar intake. Fifteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with English speaking adults residing in South Australia. Participants were purposively sampled from a national survey based on their sugar consumption levels, age and gender. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. Participants…
What can families gain from the family meal? A mixed-papers systematic review
Effects of mobility and location on food access
In Pursuit of the Study of Pleasure: Implications for Health Research and Practice
Many public health interventions attempt to promote health and well-being while simultaneously engaging with or negating pleasure-seeking activities. Yet the examination of pleasure is under-researched, especially within health and health-related areas. We examine pleasure as both an innate drive and a socially constructed phenomenon. Using the development of religious ideas in western cultures, we identify four forms of pleasure: carnal pleasure…
Governing childhood obesity: Framing regulation of fast food advertising in the Australian print media
Trust in the health system: An analysis and extension of the social theories of Giddens and Luhmann
Social theory provides a lens through which we can analyse the role of trust in health systems. However, the majority of theoretically informed trust literature addresses ‘institutional’ or ‘interpersonal’ trust individually, failing to investigate trust as determined by a ‘web’ of mutually interacting relationships between individuals and social systems. Current theoretical assumptions are also problematic as they fail to recognise the role that…
Reconnecting Australian consumers and producers: Identifying problems of distrust
The government of girth
The current preoccupation with body weight in western cultures is arguably unprecedented. The obesity crisis has engaged not only health communities, but numerous other public and private organisations, and, in so doing, has created moral alarm as well as a medical crisis. This paper examines the development of obesity and will discuss the ways in which fatness has been rationalised within health discourses. It will explore the way that the corpu…
The Family Meal Framework: A grounded theory study conceptualising the work that underpins the family meal
The family meal has been recognised as an integral part of family life. With the positive health outcomes associated with the family meal, it has been proposed as a strategy for encouraging health-promoting behaviours. However, a detailed understanding of the physical and mental work required to execute the family meal is lacking. The aim of this research was to conduct a grounded theory study to understand the components required to successfully…
Intergenerational transmission of dietary behaviours: A qualitative study of Anglo-Australian, Chinese-Australian and Italian-Australian three-generation families
The process of making trust related judgements through interaction with food labelling
How do South Australian consumers negotiate and respond to information in the media about food and nutrition: The importance of risk, trust and uncertainty
The amount of information in the media about food and nutrition is increasing. As part of the risk society, consumers have a moral imperative to synthesize this information in order to manage their diet. This article explores how media information about food affects how consumers place trust in the food system and strategies adopted to manage conflicting nutritional information. Qualitative interviews were undertaken with 47 shoppers drawn from h…
Australian children's views about food advertising on television
Barriers and enablers to the family meal across time; a grounded theory study comparing South Australian parents’ perspectives
Family meals are positively associated with numerous beneficial health and social outcomes. Current discourse however claims that parents are faced with numerous barriers when trying to bring the family together to share a meal. Solutions for overcoming barriers to a positive shared family meal are often individualistic and do not address the systemic pressures and burdens families have faced for decades. The aim of this study was to explore the …
Managing uncertainty about food risks – Consumer use of food labelling
Infant mental health promotion and the discourse of risk
The field of infant mental health promotion has rapidly developed in academia, health policy and practice. Although there are roots in earlier childhood health and welfare movements, recent developments in infant mental health promotion are distinct and different. This article examines the development and practice of infant mental health promotion in South Australia. A regional, intersectoral forum with a focus on families and young children was …
A critical discourse analysis of Canadian and Australian public health recommendations promoting physical activity to children
In the past decades, public health has increasingly addressed what has been called the children’s obesity ‘epidemic’, most notably through large-scale initiatives promoting physical activity. Through a discourse analysis the current paper critically examines such efforts in Canadian and Australian public health. Public health websites in Canada and Australia were examined for information concerning children’s health, physical activity and obesity…
Additive and subtractive resilience strategies as enablers of biographical reinvention: A qualitative study of ex-smokers and never-smokers
Sharing the load: A qualitative exploration of what mothers and fathers believe the father’s role should be in food provisioning
Consumer trust in the Australian food system – The everyday erosive impact of food labelling
Consumer Faith: An Exploration of Trust in Food and the Impact of Religious Dietary Norms and Certification
Formal affiliation or subscription to a religious group presents an additional element or layer of trust that people negotiate throughout their experiences in purchasing and consuming food. This paper reports qualitative findings from an Australian pilot study of food and consumer trust, derived from in-depth interviews with nineteen participants across four religious groups. The grounded theory approach reveals that religion is, in varying degre…
I'm not dieting, 'I'm doing it for science: Masculinities and the experience of dieting
Despite heightened concerns about levels of obesity and overweight in Western societies, there is a relative absence of sociological research into the subjective experience of dieting, especially for men. This paper focuses on findings related to the male participants from a qualitative study of fourteen volunteers (six female and eight male) drawn from a larger clinical trial comparing two diet conditions. Semi-structured interviews were conduct…
Exploring unequal class logics of mealtime food socialisation. An ethnography of family meals in France and Australia
Regular family mealtimes are occasions to model food consumption and have been associated with health and well-being benefits for children. This study aimed to investigate children's mealtime food socialisation in socially diverse households. Nine families from France and five from Australia were recruited, ranging from lower middle-class to upper-class positions, with children mostly between the ages of five to eight. The data is composed of the…
Warning labels and interpretive nutrition labels: Impact on substitution between sugar and artificially sweetened beverages, juice and water in a real-world selection task
Effective strategies to reduce free sugar intake are needed. This study examined exposure to a warning label, independently and in conjunction with a Health Star Rating (HSR) label, on the selection of commercially available cold beverages with real decision-making stakes. Participants (N = 511, 47.9% female, mean = 21.7 (SD = 6.1) years) accessed an online convenience store app via an on-campus laptop to select one of 10 beverages (5 sugar-sweet…
Promoting Recall and Preserving the Historical Authenticity of Data Used to Investigate Food Regulatory Policy in Australia
This article reports on research methodology used for a case study investigating public health nutrition engagement in food regulatory policy processes in Australia. It aims to explore methods used and outline a model for how researchers can promote participant recall and accuracy. A set of key documents identified as relevant to voluntary food fortification policy (VFP) were analysed using Bacchi's 'What's the problem represented to be?' approac…
A Children’s Rights Perspective on Food Advertising to Children
This article applies the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to the regulation of food advertising for the prevention of childhood obesity, evaluating the advertising regulation in six jurisdictions against the principles of the Convention. It finds that the Convention would support strict regulation of food advertising for the prevention of childhood obesity; and in particular that such regulation would be appropriate to the mod…
Media actors’ perceptions of their roles in reporting food incidents
The training of translators and interpreters in the United Kingdom
The provision for the training of translators and interpreters at the University level in the United Kingdom differs from that obtaining in continental Europe. No university in the United Kingdom has the equivalent of the continental university interpreter/translator school or institute. Instead, programmes for the training of translators and interpreters have been established, nearly always at the postgraduate level, in university departments of…
A Question of Balance: Nutrition, Health and Gastronomy
The government and ethics of health promotion: The importance of Michel Foucault
A debate about the ethics of health promotion recently appeared in this journal. While the papers involved provided a number of new insights into this area, they appeared to stop short of many possibilities. In particular, the dismissal of the relevance of the work of Foucault in this area prevented another line of inquiry opening up. This paper provides a fuller explication of Foucault's relevance of ethics and health promotion. It draws attenti…
The science and spirituality of nutrition
Debates about the development of the science of nutrition have been limited to either ascetic views of the body in eighteenth-century Europe or to scientific ideas about physiological economy of food. These debates do not allow a full appreciation of the heritage of the ideas that are part of nutrition discourse. Using Foucault's work on governmentality it is shown here that ideas embedded in nutrition emerged from both scientific knowledges whic…
Why food policy is critical to public health
(2003). Why food policy is critical to public health. Critical Public Health: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 99-105
In Pursuit of the Study of Pleasure: Implications for Health Research and Practice
Many public health interventions attempt to promote health and well-being while simultaneously engaging with or negating pleasure-seeking activities. Yet the examination of pleasure is under-researched, especially within health and health-related areas. We examine pleasure as both an innate drive and a socially constructed phenomenon. Using the development of religious ideas in western cultures, we identify four forms of pleasure: carnal pleasure…
Public health nutrition and food policy
Food in its many manifestations allows us to explore the global control of health and to examine the ways in which food choice is moulded by many interests. The global food market is controlled by a small number of companies who operate a system that delivers ‘cheap’ food to the countries of the developed world. This ‘cheap’ food comes at a price, which externalises costs to the nation state in terms of health consequences (diabetes, coronary hea…
A qualitative study exploring socio-economic differences in parental lay knowledge of food and health: Implications for public health nutrition
Background The role played by lay knowledge in understanding health inequalities has received increased interest recently. Very little is known, however, about how lay knowledge of food and health varies across social class. The present exploratory study compared and contrasted ways in which people from different social backgrounds draw on and use different forms of lay knowledge about food and health. Method Parents from 40 families were recruit…
Food, Morals and Meaning
Food, morals, and meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating
Food, Morals and Meaning traces our complex relationship with food and eating and our preoccupation with diet, self-discipline and food guilt. Using our current fascination with health and nutrition, it explores why our appetite for food pleasures makes us feel anxious. This second edition includes an examination of how our current obsession with body size, especially fatness, drives a national and international panic about the obesity 'epidemic'…
Food and trust in Australia: Building a picture
Objective To explore consumer trust in food, especially people’s experiences that support or diminish trust in the food supply; consumer practices to strengthen trust in food; and views on how trust in the food supply could be increased. Setting Adelaide, South Australia. Design In-depth qualitative research interviews and focus groups. Subjects Women and men who are primary food providers in families ( n = 24). Results Media coverage of food sca…
Exploring nutrition knowledge and the demographic variation in knowledge levels in an Australian community sample
Objectives Explore the level of general nutrition knowledge and demographic influences of knowledge levels in a community sample. Design and setting A sample of volunteers, recruited from community centres in two suburbs of differing socio-economic status, in Adelaide, South Australia. Subjects Two hundred and one people, aged 18 years and older, completed a modified and validated version of the General Nutrition Knowledge Questionnaire (113 item…
Effects of mobility and location on food access
The government of girth
The current preoccupation with body weight in western cultures is arguably unprecedented. The obesity crisis has engaged not only health communities, but numerous other public and private organisations, and, in so doing, has created moral alarm as well as a medical crisis. This paper examines the development of obesity and will discuss the ways in which fatness has been rationalised within health discourses. It will explore the way that the corpu…
Trust in the health system: An analysis and extension of the social theories of Giddens and Luhmann
Social theory provides a lens through which we can analyse the role of trust in health systems. However, the majority of theoretically informed trust literature addresses ‘institutional’ or ‘interpersonal’ trust individually, failing to investigate trust as determined by a ‘web’ of mutually interacting relationships between individuals and social systems. Current theoretical assumptions are also problematic as they fail to recognise the role that…
Governing childhood obesity: Framing regulation of fast food advertising in the Australian print media
An investigation of the ways in which public health nutrition policy and practices can address climate change
Objective To develop a framework to guide action in the public health nutrition workforce to develop policies and practices addressing factors contributing to climate change. Design Action/consultative research. Setting Interviews – South Australia, questionnaire – Australia. Subjects Interviews – key informants ( n 6) were from various government, academic and non-government positions, invited through email. Questionnaire – participants were mem…
An ecological analysis of factors associated with food insecurity in South Australia, 2002–7
Objective To estimate the extent of food insecurity in South Australia and its relationship with a variety of socio-economic variables. Design Data collected routinely from 2002 to 2007 by SA Health were analysed to explore food security in the State’s population. An ecological analysis of data collected by the South Australian Monitoring and Surveillance System (SAMSS) that collects data on key health indicators. Questions on food security are a…
The importance of resilience and stress to maintaining smoking abstinence and cessation: A qualitative study in Australia with people diagnosed with depression
This study explored stress in relation to smoking and how non-smokers (never-smoked and ex-smokers) are 'resilient' to smoking in a population where there is a high prevalence of smoking (people diagnosed with depression). In-depth oral history interviews were conducted with 34 adult participants from metropolitan Adelaide, and who were medically diagnosed with depression. Participants were recruited according to their smoking status (currently s…
Australian children's views about food advertising on television
I'm not dieting, 'I'm doing it for science: Masculinities and the experience of dieting
Despite heightened concerns about levels of obesity and overweight in Western societies, there is a relative absence of sociological research into the subjective experience of dieting, especially for men. This paper focuses on findings related to the male participants from a qualitative study of fourteen volunteers (six female and eight male) drawn from a larger clinical trial comparing two diet conditions. Semi-structured interviews were conduct…
Food insecurity in South Australian single parents: An assessment of the livelihoods framework approach
Single parent households experience periods of food insecurity more frequently than other Australian families. Despite elevated risk, many single parents achieve food security with limited means. This article applies and evaluates the utility of the livelihoods framework approach as a tool for understanding food insecurity in this population and generating relevant policy recommendations. The approach is adapted here to provide insight into the s…
Drugs’ pleasures
Discourses on drug use and public health show a relative neglect of the study of pleasure. We argue that work on the social, cultural and historical specificity of bodies and the emotions can be usefully drawn upon to study the pleasures of drug use. This article reflects upon the nature of pleasure and its under-representation in public health approaches to drug use and methodologies. It considers four varieties of drug pleasures: carnal pleasur…
Additive and subtractive resilience strategies as enablers of biographical reinvention: A qualitative study of ex-smokers and never-smokers
Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges
This book illuminates, commemorates, and builds upon Bacchi s WPR approach. It outlines the trajectory of the development of the WPR approach from Bacchi s early engagements with feminist thinking, as an academic in scholarly environments which were often the preserve of men, towards the theoretical sophistication of an approach which requires an ongoing critical assessment of assumptions about the social world, social problems , policy agendas d…
Medicine (56 works) · Political science (47 works) · Sociology (44 works) · Psychology (42 works) · Business (34 works) · Public relations (25 works) · Social science (25 works) · Geography (23 works) · Marketing (22 works) · Public health (22 works)