A race, class, and gender analysis of thriving - Thriving: Broadening the Paradigm Beyond Illness to Health

In the analysis of women's health issues, the concept of thriving represents an effort to refocus attention away from women's vulnerability to a variety of health risks and toward their strengths in confronting or overcoming these risks (O'Leary & Ickovics, 1995). In this, it is not unlike the call within feminist sociology to move beyond the emphasis on women's marginalization to examine women's agency by focusing on the myriad ways that women struggle against gender inequality (e.g., Dill, 1979; Laslett, Brenner, & Arat, 1995; Lim, 1997; Naples, 1996). Yet in spite of this similarity to a more sociological agenda, theory and research on thriving has remained largely psychological in its focus. Individuals are typically the unit of analysis, and it is in the response of individuals that researchers often look for evidence of thriving. Thriving has also been operationalized, almost exclusively, in psychological terms (e.g., finding new meaning in life, overcoming depression).

Sociology, when it appears in thriving research, typically takes the role of external force, suggesting factors that may have an impact on thriving or predict its likelihood in any given situation. To be sure, this is an important part of thriving research. But a sociological understanding has more to contribute. For one thing, it suggests that the unit of analysis in thriving research need not be individuals. Communities, institutions, and organizations can all thrive (see also O'Leary, this issue). Nor must thriving always be operationalized in psychological terms. Individuals can respond to personal hardship or crisis by devoting themselves to community change.

When a sociological perspective is further specified theoretically, it can have profound implications for the entire conceptualization of thriving and a thriving research agenda. In particular, in this article, I discuss a race, class, and gender perspective that derives from feminist sociology and its implications for the study of thriving. After describing some of the methodological issues raised by a sociological perspective, I turn to a brief discussion of the race, class, and gender framework and a more detailed analysis of its implications. To illustrate these implications I draw from life history and focus group interviews with and field work conducted among drug-addicted women in New Haven, Connecticut, between 1992 and 1997.

Sociological Perspectives: Community and Thriving

To demonstrate not only that the individual need not be the unit of analysis in thriving research, but subsequently, that thriving need not be measured in terms of individual mental health outcomes or personality characteristics, it is useful to contrast the gay and Black communities' response to AIDS. As devastating as HIV/AIDS has been to the gay community in the United States, Gamson (1989) has shown the extent to which it has also inspired a social movement in this community. Through AIDS, he argues, and the activism it has inspired, the diseased bodies of gay men have "become a focal point of both oppression and resistance" (p. 364). In contrast, Quimby and Friedman (1989) analyze the failure to spark Black mobilization around AIDS in New York City during the same period. They note that although considerable networking occurred among Black elites, and many Blacks became informed about AIDS at conferences and the like, this was not translated into interventions or activities aimed at the lower- and working-class groups of Blacks most affected by HIV.

According to Quimby and Friedman (1989, pp. 412-413), the ability to mobilize people to address a public health problem is determined by the structures of power and influence in which the relevant populations are embedded. In the case of Blacks, they argue, there were not the institutions, subcultures, or activist groups necessary to mount an extensive response to HIV. Indeed, what resources did exist within the Black community, such as churches, elected officials, and drug treatment advocates, had practical and ideological difficulties in facing AIDS. In contrast, a more extensive institutional and activist base preexisted AIDS in the gay community and could be mobilized against it as AIDS emerged as an important public health issue.

As these examples illustrate, not only individuals, but communities, too, may be ravaged by illness and disease. And like individuals, communities may thrive in the face of such threats. Furthermore, measures of their thriving include such community-level variables as the extent to which they gain a political voice and begin to exercise influence over the public discussion of health issues. These contrasting cases also demonstrate that, as with individuals, not all communities faced with challenge thrive. But in keeping with a sociological perspective, the search for an explanation for these different responses takes researchers to social structures of power and influence rather than the characteristics of individuals.