U.S. and Non-U.S. Scholars

Fulbright New Century Scholars Program
Overview • Previous NCS Programs • NCS Scholar List • NCS Brochure • 2001-2002

Nathanson, Constance

Professor
Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
Department of Population and Family Health Sciences
Society, Politics and Public Health: A Comparative Analysis
United States

Constance A. Nathanson (USA) is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of Population and Family Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, as well as an associate of the Hopkins Population Center. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology. Nathanson's interest in historical and cross-national comparative research on public health policy issues is reflected in work on gender and mortality, on the social history of adolescent sexuality in the United States and, most recently, on policies in response to gun violence, smoking, and HIV/AIDS in injection drug users. A major goal of this latter work has been to develop a conceptual framework identifying major underlying determinants of social change in disease prevention policies across countries and across time.

Nathanson received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1967. She has been at Hopkins ever since. Her book, Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence, received the first Eliot Freidson award for outstanding books in medical sociology from the Medical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association in 1993. From 1995-1998, Nathanson held a Health Policy Research Investigator Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation during the year 1998-1999.

NCS support will allow Nathanson to complete a book based on her recent work, Disease Prevention as Social Change: Society, Politics, and Public Health in the United States, Canada, Britain, and France, to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation. In particular, this support will make possible more in depth study of the roles of advocacy groups in policy formation and change in Canada

Selected Publications:

· Nathanson, Constance (1999) Social Movements as Catalysts for Policy Change: The Case of Smoking and Guns. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 24.
· Nathanson, Constance (1996) Disease Prevention as Social Change: Toward a Theory of Public Health. Population and Development Review 22 (1996)

This research proposal builds on and is integral to an ongoing comparative analysis of the social and political forces that drive public health policymaking in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and France. Data collection and analysis are organized around countries' response to four public health problems: the late-twentieth century problems of smoking and HIV/AIDS in injection drug users; and tuberculosis and infant mortality as they emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This research strategy is intended to maximize the leverage from a qualitative case comparison of countries characterized by broad similarities in social, political, and economic structure and in the public health problems they have confronted and, at the same time, by quite different responses to these problems. Data collection and analysis are guided by a conceptual framework with three basic elements: the organization and interest of nation-states; social movements and other forms of collective action independent of the state; and ideologies that frame constructions of risk to health and to the range of interests that may compete with health. Each country's primary health care system and its major lines of social cleavage further shape the social context in which policies are made.

Within this framework, Canada presents a particularly important and interesting case. Ties of history, geography, and culture between the United States and Canada as well as the broad similarities noted above have led many Americans (not excluding academics) to ignore Canada as a major policy actor in favor of other Western countries. Canada has pursued forceful and enlightened policies in many domains of public health, however. A more detailed examination of Canada's policies in response to smoking and HIV/AIDS in injection drug users, with particular attention to the social and political circumstances of these policies' adoption and implementation, will contribute significantly both to my own project goals and, I believe, to those of the NCS program. I propose to carry out this examination during a two-month visit to McGill University, in Montreal, under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Canada, directed by Professor Antonia Maioni.

Much of the collection and preparation of data for this project has been completed. The final product will be a book, titled Disease Prevention as Social Change: Society, Politics, and Public Health in the United States, Canada, Britain, and France, to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation. My goals for the Fulbright year are: 1) for Canada, to complete data collection and the preparation of policy narratives (on which I base my analysis); 2) to complete an initial draft of the data analysis; 3) to expand my conceptual approach to public health policymaking by incorporating actors and actions at the global level.