Karen Lutfey Spencer
Biographic Data
| ID | 249998 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Lutfey Spencer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen Lutfey |
| FAMILY NAME | Spencer |
| SIGNATURE | SPENCER K L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Denver |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2975-8125 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Extending the case for a "health disparities research industrial complex": A response to Ezell
The Importance of Qualitative Methods for Understanding Racialized Injustice and Health
US research agendas have often been oriented to demographic inquiries of race and health, treating race as a presumed characteristic of individuals and predictive of a range of health outcomes. Without consideration of racialization as a process, and structural racism as embedded in social structures beyond individuals, these approaches have been limited in their ability to examine context, lived experience, interactional processes, and unpacking…
High-Stakes Treatment Negotiations Gone Awry: The Importance of Interactions for Understanding Treatment Advocacy and Patient Resistance
Doctors (and sociologists) have a long history of struggling to understand why patients seek medical help yet resist treatment recommendations. Explanations for resistance have pointed to macrostructural changes, such as the rise of the engaged patient or decline of physician authority. Rather than assuming that concepts such as resistance, authority, or engagement are exogenous phenomena transmitted via conversational conduits, we examine how th…
Unpacking gatekeeping in medical institutions: A case study of access to end-of-life patients
We use end-of-life decision making as a case for examining processes of gatekeeping in medical settings. End-of-life is an exemplar in a broader context of research in professionalized and institutionalized medical settings. Influences of biomedicalization, increases in consumer (patient) options, decreases in physician authority, and a proliferation of treatment options all contribute to a context in which ethnographic study of medical settings …
The many faces of medical treatment imperatives: Biopower and the cultural authority of medicine in late-life treatment decisions in the United States
Despite changes in specific features of the US health-care system and policy environment in the past 50 years, professional dominance of medicine remains consistent. Extant social science research has considered how the cultural authority of medicine manifests and persists, sometimes emphasizing institutional structural influences and other times focusing on how individuals' agentic behaviour shapes their decisions and strategies regarding the co…
Save My Kid: How Families of Critically Ill Children Cope, Hope, and Negotiate an Unequal Healthcare System
Sociological contributions to race and health: Diversifying the ontological and methodological agenda
Sociologists have made fundamental contributions to the study of race and health in the United States. They have disrupted biological assumptions of race, uncovered individual and structural factors that drive racial health disparities and explored the effects of racism on health. In recent years, however, with broader shifts towards big data, the work to understand the dynamics between race and health has been increasingly pursued from a quantit…
Political economy of hope as a cultural facet of biomedicalization: A qualitative examination of constraints to hospice utilization among U.S. end-stage cancer patients
A growing body of social science literature is devoted to describing processes of biomedicalization. The issue of biomedicalization is especially relevant for individuals suffering from end-stage cancer and hoping that aggressive end-of-life interventions, which are riddled with uncertainty around quantity or quality of life, will produce a 'cure'. To examine hospice underutilization among end-stage cancer patients, we apply the anthropological c…
Transforming Patient Compliance Research in an Era of Biomedicalization
The term patient noncompliance emerged in the 1970s as a tool for analyzing why people do not follow medical directives. Despite its early popularity, the term has languished in sociology while flourishing in biomedical arenas. It seems flaccid in a contemporary healthcare context as it overestimates physician authority and is tone-deaf to biomedicalization. I draw from sociological and anthropological traditions, as well as qualitative interview…
A Qualitative Investigation of Cross-domain Influences on Medical Decision Making and the Importance of Social Context for Understanding Barriers to Hospice Use
Hospice utilization has the potential to improve quality of life for patients while also decreasing healthcare costs at end of life. Barriers to hospice utilization have been identified, but less is known about how patient, provider, and system domains influence one another. We use in-depth interviews with physicians to examine the social, cultural, and economic contexts of decision making and how physician and organizational domains influence pa…
What is the future of research on medical decision making? (And is it bright?): A response to Drewniak and colleagues
Social Foundations of Health Care Inequality and Treatment Bias
It is widely assumed that the use of medical care will lead to improvements in health, yet questions remain about the medical system's contributions to health disparities. In this review, we examine these issues with a specific focus on how health care systems may actually generate or exacerbate health disparities. We review current knowledge about inequality and bias in the health care system, including the epidemiology of such patterns and thei…
Social Foundations of Health Care Inequality and Treatment Bias
It is widely assumed that the use of medical care will lead to improvements in health, yet questions remain about the medical system's contributions to health disparities. In this review, we examine these issues with a specific focus on how health care systems may actually generate or exacerbate health disparities. We review current knowledge about inequality and bias in the health care system, including the epidemiology of such patterns and thei…
Political economy of hope as a cultural facet of biomedicalization: A qualitative examination of constraints to hospice utilization among U.S. end-stage cancer patients
A growing body of social science literature is devoted to describing processes of biomedicalization. The issue of biomedicalization is especially relevant for individuals suffering from end-stage cancer and hoping that aggressive end-of-life interventions, which are riddled with uncertainty around quantity or quality of life, will produce a 'cure'. To examine hospice underutilization among end-stage cancer patients, we apply the anthropological c…
Transforming Patient Compliance Research in an Era of Biomedicalization
The term patient noncompliance emerged in the 1970s as a tool for analyzing why people do not follow medical directives. Despite its early popularity, the term has languished in sociology while flourishing in biomedical arenas. It seems flaccid in a contemporary healthcare context as it overestimates physician authority and is tone-deaf to biomedicalization. I draw from sociological and anthropological traditions, as well as qualitative interview…
The many faces of medical treatment imperatives: Biopower and the cultural authority of medicine in late-life treatment decisions in the United States
Despite changes in specific features of the US health-care system and policy environment in the past 50 years, professional dominance of medicine remains consistent. Extant social science research has considered how the cultural authority of medicine manifests and persists, sometimes emphasizing institutional structural influences and other times focusing on how individuals' agentic behaviour shapes their decisions and strategies regarding the co…
High-Stakes Treatment Negotiations Gone Awry: The Importance of Interactions for Understanding Treatment Advocacy and Patient Resistance
Doctors (and sociologists) have a long history of struggling to understand why patients seek medical help yet resist treatment recommendations. Explanations for resistance have pointed to macrostructural changes, such as the rise of the engaged patient or decline of physician authority. Rather than assuming that concepts such as resistance, authority, or engagement are exogenous phenomena transmitted via conversational conduits, we examine how th…
Sociological contributions to race and health: Diversifying the ontological and methodological agenda
Sociologists have made fundamental contributions to the study of race and health in the United States. They have disrupted biological assumptions of race, uncovered individual and structural factors that drive racial health disparities and explored the effects of racism on health. In recent years, however, with broader shifts towards big data, the work to understand the dynamics between race and health has been increasingly pursued from a quantit…
The Importance of Qualitative Methods for Understanding Racialized Injustice and Health
US research agendas have often been oriented to demographic inquiries of race and health, treating race as a presumed characteristic of individuals and predictive of a range of health outcomes. Without consideration of racialization as a process, and structural racism as embedded in social structures beyond individuals, these approaches have been limited in their ability to examine context, lived experience, interactional processes, and unpacking…
Unpacking gatekeeping in medical institutions: A case study of access to end-of-life patients
We use end-of-life decision making as a case for examining processes of gatekeeping in medical settings. End-of-life is an exemplar in a broader context of research in professionalized and institutionalized medical settings. Influences of biomedicalization, increases in consumer (patient) options, decreases in physician authority, and a proliferation of treatment options all contribute to a context in which ethnographic study of medical settings …
Save My Kid: How Families of Critically Ill Children Cope, Hope, and Negotiate an Unequal Healthcare System
What is the future of research on medical decision making? (And is it bright?): A response to Drewniak and colleagues
Social Foundations of Health Care Inequality and Treatment Bias
It is widely assumed that the use of medical care will lead to improvements in health, yet questions remain about the medical system's contributions to health disparities. In this review, we examine these issues with a specific focus on how health care systems may actually generate or exacerbate health disparities. We review current knowledge about inequality and bias in the health care system, including the epidemiology of such patterns and thei…
A Qualitative Investigation of Cross-domain Influences on Medical Decision Making and the Importance of Social Context for Understanding Barriers to Hospice Use
Hospice utilization has the potential to improve quality of life for patients while also decreasing healthcare costs at end of life. Barriers to hospice utilization have been identified, but less is known about how patient, provider, and system domains influence one another. We use in-depth interviews with physicians to examine the social, cultural, and economic contexts of decision making and how physician and organizational domains influence pa…
Political economy of hope as a cultural facet of biomedicalization: A qualitative examination of constraints to hospice utilization among U.S. end-stage cancer patients
A growing body of social science literature is devoted to describing processes of biomedicalization. The issue of biomedicalization is especially relevant for individuals suffering from end-stage cancer and hoping that aggressive end-of-life interventions, which are riddled with uncertainty around quantity or quality of life, will produce a 'cure'. To examine hospice underutilization among end-stage cancer patients, we apply the anthropological c…
Transforming Patient Compliance Research in an Era of Biomedicalization
The term patient noncompliance emerged in the 1970s as a tool for analyzing why people do not follow medical directives. Despite its early popularity, the term has languished in sociology while flourishing in biomedical arenas. It seems flaccid in a contemporary healthcare context as it overestimates physician authority and is tone-deaf to biomedicalization. I draw from sociological and anthropological traditions, as well as qualitative interview…
Save My Kid: How Families of Critically Ill Children Cope, Hope, and Negotiate an Unequal Healthcare System
Sociological contributions to race and health: Diversifying the ontological and methodological agenda
Sociologists have made fundamental contributions to the study of race and health in the United States. They have disrupted biological assumptions of race, uncovered individual and structural factors that drive racial health disparities and explored the effects of racism on health. In recent years, however, with broader shifts towards big data, the work to understand the dynamics between race and health has been increasingly pursued from a quantit…
The many faces of medical treatment imperatives: Biopower and the cultural authority of medicine in late-life treatment decisions in the United States
Despite changes in specific features of the US health-care system and policy environment in the past 50 years, professional dominance of medicine remains consistent. Extant social science research has considered how the cultural authority of medicine manifests and persists, sometimes emphasizing institutional structural influences and other times focusing on how individuals' agentic behaviour shapes their decisions and strategies regarding the co…
Unpacking gatekeeping in medical institutions: A case study of access to end-of-life patients
We use end-of-life decision making as a case for examining processes of gatekeeping in medical settings. End-of-life is an exemplar in a broader context of research in professionalized and institutionalized medical settings. Influences of biomedicalization, increases in consumer (patient) options, decreases in physician authority, and a proliferation of treatment options all contribute to a context in which ethnographic study of medical settings …
Extending the case for a "health disparities research industrial complex": A response to Ezell
The Importance of Qualitative Methods for Understanding Racialized Injustice and Health
US research agendas have often been oriented to demographic inquiries of race and health, treating race as a presumed characteristic of individuals and predictive of a range of health outcomes. Without consideration of racialization as a process, and structural racism as embedded in social structures beyond individuals, these approaches have been limited in their ability to examine context, lived experience, interactional processes, and unpacking…
High-Stakes Treatment Negotiations Gone Awry: The Importance of Interactions for Understanding Treatment Advocacy and Patient Resistance
Doctors (and sociologists) have a long history of struggling to understand why patients seek medical help yet resist treatment recommendations. Explanations for resistance have pointed to macrostructural changes, such as the rise of the engaged patient or decline of physician authority. Rather than assuming that concepts such as resistance, authority, or engagement are exogenous phenomena transmitted via conversational conduits, we examine how th…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Health care (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Qualitative research (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Nursing (5 works) · Public relations (5 works)