'Would You Consider Yourself a Healthy Person?' : Using Focus Groups to Explore Health as a Moral Phenomenon

Abstract

Recent psychological, sociological and cultural theory has suggested that health has become a moral phenomenon. The main aim of this paper is to illustrate how focus groups constitute a particularly useful method of investigating the way in which people routinely engage in moral reasoning in the course of conversations and debates regarding health related issues. The four focus groups drawn upon in this study formed part of a larger study whose aim was to explore attitudes towards health and a theoretically postulated increasing ‘resistance’ to health promotion amongst the general public. Accordingly, the focus groups covered themes such as: concepts of healthy and unhealthy; individual responsibility for health; attitudes and responses to health promotion; public trust in medicine, science, doctors and health information; and the relationship between health, individual freedom and government intervention.