The oeuvre of risk in health promotion: a reflexive metatheoretical critique

Abstract

In this dissertation I make a case for heightened reflexivity within health promotion via a metatheoretical critique of the field levied through the lens of my own research - a quantitative study into the media usage patterns of 1271 junior high school students carried out in 2005, and a youth-led media literacy production project on media and adolescent health, carried out in 2006. Initially formulated as a study of the impact of mass media on adolescent health, I ultimately came to question the ontological and epistemological assumptions grounding this inquiry. My concern centred on the prominence of risk as the dominant discourse within the prevention field today and its construction of media as risk, adolescence as a period of risk, and the family unit as an agent of risk. Accordingly, I reoriented this dissertation as a metatheoretical critique of this oeuvre of risk along with the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning the field of health promotion more generally. In short, what began as an investigation into the impact of media on adolescent health has become an interrogation of the more substantive issue of how evermore aspects of the private and social worlds of individuals have come under the gaze of health promotion. Through this dissertation I intend to illuminate the limits of risk as a social category for understanding complex health issues, as well as epidemiological modes of inquiry as ways of knowing within the field.