Marcel Calvez

The self as risk taker: a cultural theory of contagion in relation to AIDS

Some people are prepared to take high risks with their lives and those of others. Should this be surprising? Is it more normal to be risk-taking? or risk averse? The argument below will be that the risk taking facet and the risk-averse facet of the personality each emerges in the course of a public debate on freedom and control. It is not psychology but anthropology that shows how the community forces sharp and clear ideas about the self upon its members.

Missed opportunities for HIV testing in newly-HIV-diagnosed patients, a cross sectional study

BackgroundIn France, 1/3 HIV-infected patients is diagnosed at an advanced stage of the disease. We describe missed opportunities for earlier HIV testing in newly-HIV-diagnosed patients.MethodsCross sectional study. Adults living in France for ≥1 year, diagnosed with HIV-infection ≤6 months earlier, were included from 06/2009 to 10/2010. We collected information on patient characteristics at diagnosis, history of HIV testing, contacts with healthcare settings, and occurrence of HIV-related events 3 years prior to HIV diagnosis. During these 3 years, we assessed whether or not HIV testing had been proposed by the healthcare provider upon first contact in patients notifying that they were MSM or had HIV-related conditions.Results1,008 newly HIV-diagnosed patients (mean age: 39 years; male: 79%; MSM: 53%; diagnosed with an AIDS-defining event: 16%). During the 3-year period prior to HIV diagnosis, 99% of participants had frequented a healthcare setting and 89% had seen a general practitioner at least once a year. During a contact with a healthcare setting, 91/191 MSM (48%) with no HIV-related conditions, said being MSM; 50 of these (55%) did not have any HIV test proposal. Only 21% (41/191) of overall MSM who visited a healthcare provider received a test proposal. Likewise, 299/364 patients (82%) who sought care for s had a missed opportunity for HIV testing.ConclusionsUnder current screening policies, missed opportunities for HIV testing remain unacceptably high. This argues in favor of improving risk assessment, and HIV-related conditions recognition in all healthcare facilities.

Involvement and detachment in intellectual disability studies

Attention given to the role of researchers in qualitative methods questions the conditions of production of knowledge on the experience of persons with intellectual disabilities. The involvement of researchers has to be discussed regarding their interactions with members of a muted group labelled as having social and communicative incompetence. The article discusses the interest of first person researchers’ texts in the approach to the social experience of intellectual disability. It advocates a reasonable use of personal accounts of research to explain the conditions of production of knowledge and develop comparability between studies.

The Mentally Handicapped and the Neighbourhood: A Cultural Analysis of Handicap as a Representation

“Handicap” is a word that has come into general use in French to designate impairments and disabilities. The purpose of this article is to examine the representations which give meaning to the notion of handicap in everyday language. It looks at their content and variation according to the ways in which social relations are organized. It is based upon ethnographic work that was carried out on how people labelled as “mentally handicapped” related to their neighbours in a small Brittany city. It uses the cultural analysis developed by Mary Douglas to analyse types of social construction of handicap.

A French Paradox According to Epidemiologists : on the Development of the Sociology of Health in France

The article discusses a paradox pointed out by epidemiologists and consisting in the quasi-absence of French sociologists in research on social determinants of health whereas references to Durkheim and Bourdieu are central in that field. It considers the handbooks of medical sociology and sociology of health published since the 1970s and gives an overview of the theoretical frameworks in use in French sociology of health. It examines the formation of this orientation in three periods to which correspond three layers of research topics and approaches: the foundation in the 1960s in which American medical sociology compensates partly the limitations of French sociology, the institutionalization in the 1970s marked by a firm orientation towards qualitative sociology, and the consolidation during the Aids years. These orientations are replaced in their institutional context and related to strategic choices made by researchers.