Social sciences research conducted on the topic of health aims to analyze the transformation of societies and of their environment, while examining the vulnerabilities and inequities these transformations may produce on the health and care of populations. These changes can be understood through the prism of family, of gender, of migration, and of the social environment. All these entries enable researchers to study population health and care given to individuals.
Weakened by the economic crisis and the austerity plans in both developed and developing countries, and constrained by a growing social demand, developing countries find it more and more difficult to ensure their sovereign functions, such as the financing of quality health services. In addition, although they are supported by international bodies, new ways of funding health schemes, such as the universal health care and payments based on performance, often remain at the level of political discourse and/or remains poorly evaluated. Now, with a growing pressure on them, the poorest households have yet to fulfil their duty of mutual aid and support for sick people. Therefore, not only social inequalities in the field of health become a central focus of many research projects in social science research, but health and its societal challenges become also a transversal and multidisciplinary research object. This particular theme of health has then stimulated in the recent past the development of particularly fruitful research methods in social sciences. Access to these methods for young scholars is the purpose of the first edition of the Social Science Winter School in Pondicherry.
Four international and multidisciplinary teams of experts have been constituted so as to propose to the public of students four sub-themes, with a focus on disciplinary and specific methodological aspects of research:
- Workshop 1: Universalisation of health care: questions, methods and assessments
- Workshop 2: Impact evaluation of public health policies and development programmes
- Workshop 3: Analysis of health controversies in a global context
- Workshop 4: Transformations in health and medicine. Conceptualisation and assessment in the social sciences