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November 24, 2009
Courses Course Schedule
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Elizabeth Armstrong's ResearchHealth and WellbeingA major research initiative of Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong is a study of the evolution of fetal personhood and its impact on the practice and ethics of obstetrics. Advances in medical technology have reconfigured our cultural understandings of pregnancy, giving rise to a new cultural idea, that of fetal personhood--the notion that the fetus is a person, distinct from the pregnant woman. Armstrong's research examines how that idea has shaped the way pregnant women, obstetricians and the public at large think about pregnancy, pregnant women and fetuses. Armstrong's collaboration with Dan Carpenter (Harvard University) and Marie Hojnacki (Pennsylvania State University) is an investigation of agenda setting around disease. This project seeks to understand how and why some diseases get more attention in the public arena than other diseases. A paper based on this project won the Eliot Freidson Award from the Medical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association in 2007. Armstrong is also a co-investigator on a proposed multi-site study that will collect qualitative and quantitative data to understand how women make decisions about childbirth, particularly in light of recent policy and media attention to the issue of elective cesarean delivery. Armstrong has also begun working on a new study of lay and professional attitudes towards immunization, as well as continuing to work with an interdisciplinary research group on ideas about risk in obstetrics and gynecology. The group published a paper on the risks, values, and decision making in pregnancy in Obstetrics and Gynecology, the leading clinical journal for ob/gyns in the United States.View All Research on Health and Wellbeing Source: OPR Annual Reports.
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