Rafael Hernandez-Arias
Ph.D. Brandeis University
Assistant Professor
Health/Illness/Medicine, Social Theory and Methods of Social Research

Room #1114
Phone: 773.325.4995
Fax: 773.325.7821
E-mail: phernan8@depaul.edu

My fields of specialization are: sociology of health, illness, and medicine; sociology of science; and comparative health policy analysis. My work in health research and health policy began with a paper I wrote as an undergraduate student at Hunter College. The paper was an analysis of how social organization has a direct relationship with health outcomes. After a successful revolution in 1979, the Nicaragua government made health a national priority. Within ten years, such prioritization contributed to improving key national health indicators. This early research experience set the premise that still guides my teaching and research: the ways in which a society is organized have direct effects on the ways in which individuals living in such a society experience health, illness, and medicine.

While working on my doctoral studies at Brandeis University, I became interested in another form or social organization, how scientific knowledge delimits policy making. InJuly 16, 2008fine population categories, such as race and ethnicity, when used as variables. Instead, they implicitly construct categories using references to physical appearances, origin, and cultural features. I demonstrated that the ways in which investigators construct categories delimits the ways in which they explain research results. These research results explain why the processes and mechanism leading to persistent health disparities among differentiated population groups in the U.S. remains so poorly understood. Such a circular production of knowledge contributes to reifying ideas about human differences, hinders explanations, and delimits policy making.

Since I came to DePaul two years ago, I have been attempting to bridge my previous interests. I am currently interested in understanding the relationship between larger forms of social organization, such as the ongoing economic and cultural expansion, often called globalization, and the experience of health, illness and medicine. I am focusing on two components of this relationship: migrant population and health, particularly the experience of migrant populations in Chicago; and, health policy reforms, particularly the push for the privatization of medical services in the Central American region. I have been privileged to work on these and other research projects in collaboration with many talented students. This winter and spring, I will teach undergraduate and graduate courses related to these research areas.

The emphasis in all of my courses is learning to search for answers to ‘why’ questions. For instance, why many of your classmates, such an educated and smart group of people, choose to smoke? Does people on campus smoke because they are fools or because they gain from being smokers? Using social theories and research strategies, we work towards identifying rationales, pathways, and mechanisms that explain a given outcome, such as why people choose to smoke. In developing explanations about patterns you are in a position to understand ‘why’ an outcome is possible, and therefore able to abstract what can be done to address such patterns.

In most of my courses, we use a multi-national comparative approach to search for answers to larger ‘why’ questions. For instance, why, while spending the most in health care, the health status of those living in U.S. ranks so poorly in comparison to populations living in other industrialized countries? Does the emphasis on curative care over preventive health policies explain why U.S. spend so much in medical services and ranks so poorly in key health indicators? The international comparative perspective provides opportunity to learn how people in other countries have developed health policies, sustain health, become ill, and experience health services. Such views allow us to imagine ways to improve our own medical services.