Bridging The Social-Biomedical Divide: Uncovering Explanatory Conflicts In The Public Health Literature

Abstract

Purpose and Research Objective: Philosophers of science have paid significant attention to monism, the conviction that there is a single salient explanation for a given phenomenon in the natural world. Since this view can cause research programs to ignore or discredit alternative scientific understandings, it presents a barrier to interdisciplinary research and intellectual plurality.  To date, no study has sought to systematically characterize monistic conflicts in public health research, specifically disagreements between the social determinants focused  “Social approaches” and the idiosyncratic “Biomedical approaches”. This qualitative study seeks to fill this gap in the literature by uncovering instances of monistic conflict between the social and biomedical approaches in the public health literature, utilizing childhood obesity as a case study.

Methods: The project is a narrative literature review of review articles on childhood obesity in North America.  Researchers will use qualitative content analysis to examine the articles found.

Results: Completion of the literature search revealed a bias toward the “biomedical approach”, with more articles focusing on the medical and behavioral explanations of childhood obesity issues in North America. The content analysis of the articles revealed monistic thought within the social and biomedical approaches. Monism most often took the form of omission, whith approaches neglecting to mention the causal factors central to the other approach in their explanations. Monism also appeared in the repuposing of language in biomedical articles, in which social approach terms were used in conjunction with biomedical explanations, changing their meaning in context.

Implications: Monism is a barrier to interdisciplinary research, making it a phenomenon of interest to the field of public health, which strives for multifaceted health solutions.  Understanding of the nature and extent of monism in the discipline can serve as a first step to eliminating such barriers.