Abstract
Research has pursued salutogenic and narrative approaches to deal with questions about how everyday settings are constitutive for different health practices. Healthy behavior is not a distinguishable action, but a chain of activities, often embedded in other social practices. In this article, we have endeavored to describe such a chain of activities guided by the salutogenic claim of exploring the good living argued by McCuaig and Quennerstedt. We use biographical material written by Karl Ove Knausgaard who has created a life story entitled My Struggle. The novel is selected upon an approach influenced by Brinkmann who stresses that literature can be seen as a qualitative social inquiry in which the novelist is an expert in transforming personal life experiences into common human expressions of life. The study illustrates how research with a broader notion of health can convey experiences of health, thereby complementing (and sometimes challenging) public health evidence.
Highlights
There are well-known risks associated with the dominance of quantitative approaches in the health sciences (Fernández-Guerrero et al, 2014)
Both these categories include studies that embrace a broader notion of health, they seem to take a symptom, disease, or some kind of “risky” position as a starting point for the exploration of experience and shed more light on “the limitations and causes of disease” rather than “what creates health.”. Drawing from this backdrop, we suggest that an important research focus is to study how distinguished events in life shape and condition people’s health practices (e.g., Kotliar, 2016; Vindrola-Padros & Johnson, 2014) and how health is situated in the context of everyday life (e.g., Pedersen et al, 2019)
In line with Brinkmann (2009), we argue that literature can be seen as a qualitative social inquiry in which the novelist is an expert in transforming personal life experiences into common human expressions of life
Summary
There are well-known risks associated with the dominance of quantitative approaches in the health sciences (Fernández-Guerrero et al, 2014). Not homogeneously evolving, are noticeable in this progression of a broader notion of health. Multiple theoretical lenses, a variety of methodological approaches and a wide range of voices revolve around an interest in biographical particulars as narrated by the one who lives them (Chase, 2005). It is in the intersection of these emerging fields that embark on broader notions of health that this article seeks to contribute
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