Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Theses
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ItemThe usage of psychotropic medications by family caregivers( 1996-07)This is a randomly selected, cross-sectional, population based study of women caring for family or friends who are elderly or have a long-term illness or disability. The purpose of the study was to investigate the usage of psychotropic medications by carers in order to identify predictors of usage of these medications relating to the caring situation. Data collected in 1993 by the Carers’ Program in the state of Victoria, Australia was used for statistical and qualitative analysis. The data base consisted of 157 carers and 219 non-carers. Women who had the main caring role for a relative or friend with a disability for at least 4 hours per week were selected for the study. Women who were living with a partner or children or both and had the main responsibility for household tasks but were not caring for someone with special needs were selected as the comparison group. Using this group of non-carers allowed direct comparison of carers and non-carers to be made and to identify the difference that the role of caregiving to someone with special needs makes when compared with usual family care responsibilities.
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ItemPleasure and poison: the meanings and practices of alcohol use in women's everyday lives( 1997-04)Within Australia, research on women and alcohol has been predominantly focussed on either large scale surveys of women’s consumption or on alcohol problems studies within treatment populations. Such research mainly draws upon the biomedical understandings of the body and the disease model of alcoholism. In contrast, this study examines the meanings and practices of alcohol use within the social contexts of women’s everyday lives. Alcohol is viewed as a part of life rather than as an excess or problem.
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ItemEthnospecific health and care: a critical ethnographic study of a Greek nursing home( 1999)This abstract examines how a Greek ethnospecific nursing home functions – situated within a health care system that operates within an English-language, and Anglo/ Australian derived culture. The nursing home was examined within a critical science paradigm guided, however, by Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. Critical ethnography as a research method was combined with Greek forms of speech in order to accommodate Greek women’s forms of social interaction and oral culture and to avoid imposing an alien research process on participants. Group discussions, formal and informal interviews, participant observation in a variety of forms and document examination were the approaches used to collect data in the field. A key and controversial finding of this inquiry is that the delivedry of ethnospecific aged care is heavily constrained and ultimately undermined – by the policies and practices of the Australian and dominant culture that was transposed in the nursing home, via the distribution of capital that privilege dominant groups in Australia. Because of this residents and carers remained structurally excluded from participation and decision making processes and located at the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. This inevitably helped, particularly in regards to Greek women carers, and domestic staff, including Greek speaking registered nurses, not only to maintain but increase their negative ethnic experiences, historical oppression and exploitation. Nevertheless, ethnospecific care was provided to the residents at the cultural expressive level reflecting larger society’s tolerance of a conservative multiculturalism. Significant Greek cultural care, was mediated through the Greek carers, domestic staff and residents dispositions (habitus) that contextualised their interactions, relationships and practices, enabling their past (and because of this themselves) to live in the present in a meaningfull and dynamic way. For this reason, ethnospecific services, even when constrained by external socio-cultural and political hegemony, has more to offer the Greek aged than do mainstream aged care services.