L Prior
Biographic Data
| ID | 69103 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Prior |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Prior |
| SIGNATURE | PRIOR L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University Belfast |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9903-5841 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 527 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Passion for nature: Global student motivations for forestrelated education and career aspirations
Despite the relevance of forests to biodiversity and climate change, education and careers related to them are still unattractive to young people. This paper presents findings from a study whose goal is to investigate the motivation and career aspirations of students in forest-related programmes at the university/tertiary level around the globe. The analysis is based on data gathered through a survey of 787 bachelor's, master's, and PhD students …
Content Analysis
In this chapter, the focus is on ways in which content analysis can be used to investigate and describe interview and textual data. The chapter opens with a contextualization of the method and then proceeds to an examination of the role of content analysis in relation to both quantitative and qualitative modes of social research. Following the introductory sections, four kinds of data are subjected to content analysis. These include data derived …
Materializing architecture for social care: Brick walls and compromises in design for later life
This article reports on an ethnography of architectural projects for later life social care in the UK. Informed by recent debates in material studies and "materialities of care" we offer an analysis of a care home project that is sensitive to architectural materials that are not normally associated with care and well-being. Although the care home design project we focus on in this article was never built, we found that design discussions relating…
Development of a peer support intervention to encourage dietary behaviour change towards a Mediterranean diet in adults at high cardiovascular risk
The MRC and BCW frameworks provided a systematic and complementary process for development of a theory-based peer support intervention to encourage dietary behaviour change towards a MD in non-Mediterranean adults at high CVD risk. The next step is to evaluate feasibility, acceptability, and diet behaviour change outcomes in response to the peer support intervention (change towards a MD and nutrient biomarkers) using a randomized controlled trial…
A qualitative analysis exploring preferred methods of peer support to encourage adherence to a Mediterranean diet in a Northern European population at high risk of cardiovascular disease
A group-based approach was the preferred method of peer support to encourage a population at high risk of CVD to adhere to a MD. This finding should be recognised in the development of interventions to encourage adoption of a MD in a Northern European population
Physical activity and behaviour change: The role of distributed motivation
Physical inactivity levels are rising globally. In response, public health investigators have sought to design and implement effective interventions to raise levels of physical activity in populations, communities and individuals. Usually, such interventions are built around theories of behaviour change in which notions of motivation and incentivisation loom large. Drawing on focus group evidence derived in the context of a cluster RCT aimed at i…
Dorothy E. Smith, Feminist Sociology and Institutional Ethnography: A Short Introduction
My first encounter with the work of Dorothy E Smith was via an essay about ‘K’ (published in 1978). K was a young woman who came to be described by her friends and others as ‘mentally ill’, and Smi
Automobility reconfigured? Ironic seductions and mundane freedoms in 16-21 year olds' accounts of car driving and ownership
In the light of the ‘peak-car’ thesis, this paper explores the driving-related desires and practices of adults aged 16–21 and their parents from the UK. Tropes of freedom and independence were commonly evoked; but were pragmatically framed by concerns of finance, utility and risk. Car ownership was prized only for instrumental reasons, and as one tool in a mixed, collective transport network: it had been decoupled from automobility. Environmental…
Pathways linking car transport for young adults and the public health in Northern Ireland: A qualitative study to inform the evaluation of graduated driver licensing
Key issues to consider in evaluating the broader public health impact of GDL will include: changes in injury rates for licensed car occupants and other populations and modes; changes in exposure to risk in the licensed and general population; and impact on transport exclusion. We suggest an important pathway will be change in social norms around offering and accepting lifts and to risk-taking. The growing adoption of in-car telematics will have i…
Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a physical activity loyalty scheme for behaviour change maintenance: A cluster randomised controlled trial
ISRCTN17975376 (Registered 19/09/2014)
In praise of small N , and of N = 1 in particular
There is an episode in Calvino’s Invisible Cities where a contemplative Khan, having arrived at the realisation that there was little point in adding to his global conquests, is encouraged by Marco
Documentary Analysis
Attention to documents and to documentation has a long and sturdy pedigree in sociology and other social sciences. Personal letters, diaries, written confessions, biographies, and newspaper stories constituted an essential store of materials for many early twentieth‐century social scientists (Plummer, 2001). As that century unfolded, social investigators also developed an interest in such things as laboratory notebooks, anthropological field note…
Architecture and health care: A Place for Sociology
Sociologists of health and illness have tended to overlook the architecture and buildings used in health care. This contrasts with medical geographers who have yielded a body of work on the significance of places and spaces in the experience of health and illness. A review of sociological studies of the role of the built environment in the performance of medical practice uncovers an important vein of work, worthy of further study. Through the his…
Disorder and disconnection: Parent Experiences of Liminality When Caring for Their Dying Child
Parents caring for a child with a life threatening or life limiting illness experience a protracted and largely unknown journey, as they and their child oscillate somewhere between life and death. Using an interpretive qualitative approach, interviews were conducted with parents (n = 25) of children who had died. Findings reveal parents' experiences to be characterised by personal disorder and transformation as well as social marginalisation and …
Translating policy into practice: A case study in the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease
Background This paper focuses on the relationships between health ‘policy’ as it is embodied in official documentation, and health ‘practice’ as reported and reflected on in the talk of policy‐makers, health professionals and patients. The specific context for the study involves a comparison of policies relating to the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease (CHD) in the two jurisdictions of Ireland – involving as they do a predominantly s…
Exploring lay views on physical activity and their implications for public health policy. A case study from East Belfast
Physical activity and the rejuvenation of Connswater (Parc study): Protocol for a natural experiment investigating the impact of urban regeneration on public health
The Connswater Community Greenway provides a significant opportunity to achieve long-term, population level behaviour change. We argue that urban regeneration may be conceptualised meaningfully as a complex intervention comprising multiple components with the potential, individually and interactively, to affect the behaviour of a diverse population. The development and implementation of our comprehensive evaluation framework reflects this complex…
Devolution and Patient Choice: Policy Rhetoric versus Experience in Practice
Background: market reforms in England have been identified as making a clear distinction between English health policy and health policy in the devolved systems in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Patient choice is a high profile policy in the English National Health Service that constitutes significant changes to the demand side of health care. It is not clear what national differences this has led to regarding implementation of policy. Thi…
The Discursive Turn in Policy Analysis and the Validation of Policy Stories
This paper is concerned with the language of policy documents in the field of health care, and how 'readings' of such documents might be validated in the context of a narrative analysis. The substantive focus is on a comparative study of UK health policy documents (N= 20) as produced by the various assemblies, governments and executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the period 2000-09. Following the identification of som…
Using Documents and Records in Social Research
Talking about colds and flu: The lay diagnosis of two common illnesses among older British people
P38 The impact of urban renewal on engagement in physical activity in a socio-economically disadvantaged population: A qualitative evaluation
Background Most adults in Europe lead sedentary lives; their physical inactivity is associated with a rising prevalence of obesity and is considered to contribute significantly to health inequalities. A recent NICE (2006) review concluded that, “there is an urgent need to conduct research into the effectiveness of environmental interventions, particularly within socially excluded sectors of the population who have the highest prevalence of physic…
Translating evidence into practice: A shared priority in public health
Repositioning Documents in Social Research
In matters of social research sociologists and other social scientists have tended to view documents primarily as sources of evidence and as receptacles of inert content.The key strategies for data exploration have consequently been associated with various styles of content or thematic analysis. Even when discourse analysis has been recommended, there has been a marked tendency to deal with records, files, and the like, primarily as containers - …
Documentary Analysis
To Max Weber, the written order formed an essential building block of that quintessential form of modern organizational life – bureaucracy. Many later sociologists also noted the importance of documents for structuring and facilitating human interaction. Despite this, documents in sociological studies tend to be somewhat taken for granted and more often than not used as a resource for research rather than as a topic in their own right. Indeed, in…
Belief, knowledge and expertise: The Emergence of the Lay Expert in Medical Sociology
The paper has three main aims. First, to trace - through the pages of Sociology of Health and Illness- the changing ways in which lay understandings of health and illness have been represented during the 1979-2002 period. Second, to say something about the limits of lay knowledge (and particularly lay expertise) in matters of health and medicine. Third, to call for a re-assessment of what lay people can offer to a democratised and customer-sensit…
Architecture and health care: A Place for Sociology
Sociologists of health and illness have tended to overlook the architecture and buildings used in health care. This contrasts with medical geographers who have yielded a body of work on the significance of places and spaces in the experience of health and illness. A review of sociological studies of the role of the built environment in the performance of medical practice uncovers an important vein of work, worthy of further study. Through the his…
Repositioning Documents in Social Research
In matters of social research sociologists and other social scientists have tended to view documents primarily as sources of evidence and as receptacles of inert content.The key strategies for data exploration have consequently been associated with various styles of content or thematic analysis. Even when discourse analysis has been recommended, there has been a marked tendency to deal with records, files, and the like, primarily as containers - …
The Architecture of the Hospital: A Study of Spatial Organization and Medical Knowledge
The paper opens with a review of recent developments in the sociology of spatial organization and after an examination of the ontological and epistemological assumptions which are embedded within current theorizations of space a number of arguments are advanced concerning the inter-relationships which hold between forms of knowledge, social practice and physical design. Using architectural plans, these arguments are then developed with reference …
Repositioning the patient: The Implications of Being 'At Risk
Stigma revisited, disclosure of emotional problems in primary care consultations in Wales
Doing things with illness. The micro politics of the CFS clinic
Artefact explanations of inequalities in health: An Assessment of the Evidence
Artefact explanations seek to account for inequalities in health as a construct of the measurement process. The Black Report believed that the artefact explanation was relatively unimportant in accounting for the persistence of class inequalities in health. This paper reviews the evidence on artefact explanations of class differentials in specific-cause and all-cause mortality data, and also of differentials by occupation, by geography, and by ge…
Making sense of mortality
This paper focuses upon the collection and processing of government mortality statistics, and especially upon the organisational and theoretical contexts within which such statistics are assembled. Two items of mortality data in particular are examined with a view to illustrating the broader issues: medical cause of death, and social class of deceased. Using a 10 per cent sample of 1981 Belfast death certificates as a base, the paper attempts to …
Talking about colds and flu: The lay diagnosis of two common illnesses among older British people
Beliefs and accounts of illness. Views from two Cantonese-speaking communities in England
This paper examines lay accounts of illness and health gathered - by means of eight focus groups - from people living in two Cantonese-speaking communities in England. The authors concentrate on the manner in which Cantonese speakers recruit and mobilise various agents - such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), spirits, demons, food and the weather - to describe and explain aspects of their bodily and mental wellbeing. As well as providing inf…
Rationing through risk assessment in clinical genetics: All Categories Have Wheels
This paper focuses on issues relating to rationing in the context of cancer genetics. It indicates how the allocation of scarce resources to patients in need is not simply a managerial process, but something that is routinely woven into the fine web of organisational activity. In the framework of this study - executed within a UK regional cancer genetics clinic - much of that activity circulates around issues relating to risk assessment. The auth…
Materializing architecture for social care: Brick walls and compromises in design for later life
This article reports on an ethnography of architectural projects for later life social care in the UK. Informed by recent debates in material studies and "materialities of care" we offer an analysis of a care home project that is sensitive to architectural materials that are not normally associated with care and well-being. Although the care home design project we focus on in this article was never built, we found that design discussions relating…
Disorder and disconnection: Parent Experiences of Liminality When Caring for Their Dying Child
Parents caring for a child with a life threatening or life limiting illness experience a protracted and largely unknown journey, as they and their child oscillate somewhere between life and death. Using an interpretive qualitative approach, interviews were conducted with parents (n = 25) of children who had died. Findings reveal parents' experiences to be characterised by personal disorder and transformation as well as social marginalisation and …
Policing the Dead: A Sociology of the Mortuary
This paper focuses upon the nature of the mortuary as a socio-medical institution and the discourse of pathology which operates within it. More specifically, by examining the manner in which pathology is operationalised in Belfast it demonstrates: (i) how medical interests are frequently fused with those of the wider politico-technological system within which they are ensconced; (ii) how the assumptions and investigative principles of pathology a…
Devolution and Patient Choice: Policy Rhetoric versus Experience in Practice
Background: market reforms in England have been identified as making a clear distinction between English health policy and health policy in the devolved systems in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Patient choice is a high profile policy in the English National Health Service that constitutes significant changes to the demand side of health care. It is not clear what national differences this has led to regarding implementation of policy. Thi…
The Discursive Turn in Policy Analysis and the Validation of Policy Stories
This paper is concerned with the language of policy documents in the field of health care, and how 'readings' of such documents might be validated in the context of a narrative analysis. The substantive focus is on a comparative study of UK health policy documents (N= 20) as produced by the various assemblies, governments and executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the period 2000-09. Following the identification of som…
Why people die: Social representations of death and its causes
(1993). Why people die: Social representations of death and its causes. Science as Culture: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 346-374
Talking About the Gene for Cancer: A Study of Lay and Professional Knowledge of Cancer Genetics
This article is concerned with the ways in which people who work in and use a cancer genetics clinic in the UK talk about the 'gene for cancer'. By conceptualizing such a gene as a boundary object, and using empirical data derived from clinic consultations, observations in a genetics laboratory and interviews with patients, the author seeks to illustrate how the various parties involved adopt different discursive strategies to appropriate, descri…
Automobility reconfigured? Ironic seductions and mundane freedoms in 16-21 year olds' accounts of car driving and ownership
In the light of the ‘peak-car’ thesis, this paper explores the driving-related desires and practices of adults aged 16–21 and their parents from the UK. Tropes of freedom and independence were commonly evoked; but were pragmatically framed by concerns of finance, utility and risk. Car ownership was prized only for instrumental reasons, and as one tool in a mixed, collective transport network: it had been decoupled from automobility. Environmental…
Mind, Body and Behaviour: Theorisations of Madness and the Organisation of Therapy
This paper is concerned with the socio-medical organisation of psychiatric disorder. The main line of analysis demonstrates how different psychiatric ideologies produce different objects of professional focus and, consequently, radically different forms of therapy and therapeutic environment. By way of empirical evidence, the paper examines in some detail three contrasting contexts in which psychiatric disorder has been described and organised. T…
The Good, the Bad and the Unnatural: A Study of Coroners' Decisions in Northern Ireland
This paper is concerned with an examination of the investigatory resources and explanatory principles which surround the dead. The central focus is upon the distinctions which are drawn between natural and unnatural death, and the paper has two main aims. First, it attempts to measure the direction and flow of investigatory and observatory power which emanates from the coroners' court. Second, it attempts to unravel the connotations embodied in t…
The Rationalisation of Death: The Medico-Legal System and the Elimination of Human Agency
Exploring lay views on physical activity and their implications for public health policy. A case study from East Belfast
Translating evidence into practice: A shared priority in public health
Death and Dying: Individuals and Institutions/The Challenge of a Long Life (Book)
The Rationalisation of Death: The Medico-Legal System and the Elimination of Human Agency
The Good, the Bad and the Unnatural: A Study of Coroners' Decisions in Northern Ireland
This paper is concerned with an examination of the investigatory resources and explanatory principles which surround the dead. The central focus is upon the distinctions which are drawn between natural and unnatural death, and the paper has two main aims. First, it attempts to measure the direction and flow of investigatory and observatory power which emanates from the coroners' court. Second, it attempts to unravel the connotations embodied in t…
Making sense of mortality
This paper focuses upon the collection and processing of government mortality statistics, and especially upon the organisational and theoretical contexts within which such statistics are assembled. Two items of mortality data in particular are examined with a view to illustrating the broader issues: medical cause of death, and social class of deceased. Using a 10 per cent sample of 1981 Belfast death certificates as a base, the paper attempts to …
Images of Man and Death (Book)
Policing the Dead: A Sociology of the Mortuary
This paper focuses upon the nature of the mortuary as a socio-medical institution and the discourse of pathology which operates within it. More specifically, by examining the manner in which pathology is operationalised in Belfast it demonstrates: (i) how medical interests are frequently fused with those of the wider politico-technological system within which they are ensconced; (ii) how the assumptions and investigative principles of pathology a…
Artefact explanations of inequalities in health: An Assessment of the Evidence
Artefact explanations seek to account for inequalities in health as a construct of the measurement process. The Black Report believed that the artefact explanation was relatively unimportant in accounting for the persistence of class inequalities in health. This paper reviews the evidence on artefact explanations of class differentials in specific-cause and all-cause mortality data, and also of differentials by occupation, by geography, and by ge…
The Architecture of the Hospital: A Study of Spatial Organization and Medical Knowledge
The paper opens with a review of recent developments in the sociology of spatial organization and after an examination of the ontological and epistemological assumptions which are embedded within current theorizations of space a number of arguments are advanced concerning the inter-relationships which hold between forms of knowledge, social practice and physical design. Using architectural plans, these arguments are then developed with reference …
The Social Organisation of Death: Medical Discourse and Social Practices in Belfast
A study of the way in which death is socially organized in the city of Belfast. It analyzes the responses to 415 deaths registered here in 1981, tracing the social, medical, legal, religious and polit
Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective (Book)
The Social Organization of Death: Medical Discourse and Social Practices in Belfast
Mind, Body and Behaviour: Theorisations of Madness and the Organisation of Therapy
This paper is concerned with the socio-medical organisation of psychiatric disorder. The main line of analysis demonstrates how different psychiatric ideologies produce different objects of professional focus and, consequently, radically different forms of therapy and therapeutic environment. By way of empirical evidence, the paper examines in some detail three contrasting contexts in which psychiatric disorder has been described and organised. T…
Short Notices
Short Notices Get access Frederic W. Hafferty, Into the Valley. Death and the Socialization of Medical Students, New Haven: Yale university Press, 1991. Pp. XiX + 234. £18.95. ISBN 0-300-05144-1. LINDSAY PRIOR LINDSAY PRIOR University of Ulster Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 5, Issue 3, December 1992, Pages 551-b–552, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/5.3.551-b Publishe…
Cheyne on the English Malady (1733)
Why people die: Social representations of death and its causes
(1993). Why people die: Social representations of death and its causes. Science as Culture: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 346-374
The Social Organization of Mental Illness
Medical Innovations in Historical Perspective (Book)
The Social Organization of Mental Illness
Plague's Progress. A Social History of Man and Disease (Book)
Plague's Progress. A Social History of Man and Disease
Beliefs and accounts of illness. Views from two Cantonese-speaking communities in England
This paper examines lay accounts of illness and health gathered - by means of eight focus groups - from people living in two Cantonese-speaking communities in England. The authors concentrate on the manner in which Cantonese speakers recruit and mobilise various agents - such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), spirits, demons, food and the weather - to describe and explain aspects of their bodily and mental wellbeing. As well as providing inf…
Doing things with illness. The micro politics of the CFS clinic
Rationing through risk assessment in clinical genetics: All Categories Have Wheels
This paper focuses on issues relating to rationing in the context of cancer genetics. It indicates how the allocation of scarce resources to patients in need is not simply a managerial process, but something that is routinely woven into the fine web of organisational activity. In the framework of this study - executed within a UK regional cancer genetics clinic - much of that activity circulates around issues relating to risk assessment. The auth…
Making risk visible: The role of images in the assessment of (cancer) genetic risk
Whilst analysis of 'risk' (in its many conceptual shapes) has loomed large in both medicine and social sciences over the past 25 years, detailed investigations as to how risk assessments are actually put together (in either lay or professional contexts) are few in number. The studies that are available usually focus on the use of words or everyday conversation in assembling risk. Talking about risk is, of course, important, but what tends to be i…
Patients' opinions of the use of psychiatric case‐finding questionnaires in general practice
Background The common mental disorders of depression and anxiety often remain undetected in general practice. Psychiatric screening instruments have been recommended to assist detection. Aim To assess patients' attitudes towards the use of psychiatric screening questionnaires for common mental disorders within general practice. Design Twenty focus groups comprising 127 patients were conducted in Wales, UK. The groups were distinguished by age, se…
Sociology (38 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Medicine (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Nursing (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Public health (12 works) · Social science (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works)