Memory, space and time: Researching children's lives

This article discusses the research approach in 'Pathways through Childhood', a small qualitative study drawing on memories of childhood. The research explores how wider social arrangements and social change influence children's everyday lives.The article discusses the way that the concepts of social memory, space and time have been drawn on to access and analyse children's experiences, arguing that attention to the temporal and spatial complexity of childhood reveals less visible yet formative influences and connections. Children's everyday engagements involve connections between past and present time, between children, families, communities and nations, and between different places. Children carve out space and time for themselves from these complex relations. © The Author(s) 2010

Sacred communities: contestations and connections

This article discusses a project whose purpose was to review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate studies to provide new insights about everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, with other researchers involved in similar research, and with wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of ‘faith’, connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like ‘faith’, ‘community’, and ‘life course’ are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries

Characterisation of internal tremors and vibration symptoms

Objectives To describe the experiences of patients who have postacute sequelae SARS-CoV-2 infection with internal vibrations and tremors as a prominent component, we leveraged the efforts by Survivor Corps, a grassroots COVID-19 patient advocacy group, to gather information from individuals belonging to its Facebook group with a history of COVID-19 suffering from vibrations and tremors.Setting and design A narrative analysis was performed on 140 emails and 450 social media comments from 140 individuals collected as a response to a call to >180 000 individuals participating in Survivor Corps between 15 July and 27 July 2021. We used common coding techniques and the constant comparative method for qualitative data synthesis and categorising emails. Coded data were entered into NVivo V.12 to identify recurrent themes, theme connections and supporting quotations. Comments were analysed using Word Clouds, generated with R V.4.0.3 using quanteda, wordcloud and tm packages.Main outcome measures Patient-reported long COVID symptom themes and domains related to internal tremors and vibration.Results The respondents’ emails represented 22 themes and 7 domains pertaining to their experience with internal tremor and vibrations. These domains were as follows: (1) symptom experience, description and anatomic location; (2) initial symptom onset; (3) symptom timing; (4) symptom triggers or alleviators; (5) change from baseline health status; (6) experience with medical establishment and (7) impact on individuals’ lives and livelihood. There were 22 themes in total, each corresponding to one of the broader domains. Among the responses, many described symptoms that varied in location, timing and triggers, occurred soon after their COVID-19 infection, and were markedly debilitating. There were often frustrating experiences with the healthcare system.Conclusions This study describes key themes and experiences among a group of people reporting long COVID and having a prolonged and debilitating symptom complex that prominently features internal tremors and vibrations

Time scarcity: another health inequality?

Considerable policy action has focused on the social patterning of health, especially the health risks associated with low income. More recent attention has turned to transport, food systems, workplaces, and location, and the way their intersections with social position and income create health inequalities. Time is another dimension that structures what people do; yet the way in which time contours health has been neglected. This paper explores (a) how time might influence health, and (b) the way in which time scarcity complicates current understandings of health inequalities. Alongside other meanings, time can be thought of as a health resource. People need time to access health services, build close relationships, exercise, work, play, care, and consume - all activities that are fundamental to health. There is evidence that the experience of time pressure is directly related to poorer mental health. Lack of time is also the main reason people give for not taking exercise or eating healthy food. Thus, another impact of time scarcity may be its prevention of activities and behaviours critical for good health. We investigate whether time scarcity, like financial pressure, is socially patterned, and thus likely to generate health inequality. The experience of time scarcity appears to be linked to variations in time devoted to employment or caring - activities closely bound to gender, status, and life course. One reason that time scarcity is socially patterned is because of the way in which caring is valued, allocated, and negotiated in households and the market. Adding paid employment to caring workloads is now normative,transforming the allocation of time within families. But caring requires a close interlocking with others' needs, which are often urgent and unpredictable, creating conflict with the linear, scheduled, and commodified approach to time required in the workplace. We review the evidence for the possibility that these time pressures are indeed contributing to socially patterned health inequalities among people caring for others. We also explore the potential for time scarcity to compound other sources of health inequality through interplays with income and space (urban form, transportation networks and place of residence). People who are both time and income poor, such as lone mothers, may face compounding barriers to good health, and the urban geography of time-scarce families represents the embedding of time -money- space trade-offs linked to physical location. In Australia and the US, poorer families are more likely to live in mid to outer suburbs, necessitating longer commutes to work. These suburbs have inferior public transport access, and can lack goods and services essential to health such as shops selling fresh foods. We conclude with a tentative framework for considering time and health in the context of policy actions. For example, social policy efforts to increase workforce participation may be economically necessary, but could have time-related consequences that alter health. Similarly, if cities are to be made livable, health promoting, and more equitable, urban designers need to understand time and time - income - space trade-offs. Indeed, many social policies and planning and health interventions involve time dimensions which, if they remain unacknowledged, could further compound time pressures and time-related health inequality