Grant: Operating Grant

Concerns over an "obesity epidemic" have been fueled by an increase of epidemiological and medical literature on obesity and its recuperation by the media, health and fitness practitioners, and public health officials. Observers have recognized a mixture of science and consumer culture forming a dominant "obesity discourse." More recently, obesity research has widened to include provocative studies challenging obesity's measurement, causes and treatment. Despite Best Practices Guidelines on obesity (BPGOs), it is not surprising that recent (American) studies have shown how HPs' messages about obesity are shifting and at times contradictory. The problem is that while obesity discourse and BPGOs link obesity to (un)health, HPs' efforts to improve health through reducing obesity have been largely unsuccessful. We hypothesize that Canadian HPs understand obesity in complex ways and provide different messages/prescriptions to patients/clients however there is no research on how they discursively construct obesity. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to examine the connections between HPs' discursive constructions of obesity and their stated health interventions. Using qualitative methods, we plan to content-analyze "texts" found in BGPOs and other cultural sites targeting obesity that are favored by various categories of HPs. We also plan to have participant-centered conversations with 120 French- or English-speaking HPs from Montreal and the surrounding regions. We will use a feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis method to examine both "obesity" texts and "conversational" texts. Our analysis will focus on how HPs construct obesity and health, the ways in which HPs' meanings about obesity are constructed in specific (gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity/race, dis/ability, class, obesity, pregnancy status) circumstances, and how HPs' constructions of obesity are related to their health interventions.