| Post: | Lecturer in Sociology |
| Location: | Friston Building FR-264 |
| Email: | C.Will@sussex.ac.uk |
| Telephone numbers | |
| Internal: | 8449 |
| UK: | (01273) 678449 |
| International: | +44 1273 678449 |
Biography
Catherine Will works on the sociology of science and technology, social and healthcare policy. After a History degree she studied sociology in Heidelberg and at the University of Essex, where she was awarded her MA and PhD. She has also been employed at the Centre for Civil Society, LSE, and did an ESRC/MRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Public Health and Department of Social Anthropology in Cambridge, before coming to Sussex in 2007.
Dr Will is on maternity leave between May 2009 and January 2010.
Role
Lecturer.
Research
Most recent research has focussed on the organisation of clinical research and on the meaning of 'effectiveness' for doctors, patients and government in the UK. This extends my doctoral work, which was funded by the ESRC, on the introduction of HMG CoA reductase inhibitors, commonly known as statins, in the UK. I used this case to chart clinical responses to a movement for what came to be known as evidence-based medicine: the call to ground medical practice more firmly and systematically on results from randomised controlled trials and other forms of statistical reasoning. I also investigated links between these ways of knowing and decisions about government policy relating to the modernisation of services for cardiovascular disease across the National Health Service, exploring affinities between managerial imperatives and the population-based methodologies of clinical trials and epidemiology and charting the development of the preventative paradigm in healthcare from the example of cholesterol-reduction.
I continue to work on developing sociological understandings of the attractions and effects of statistical reasoning in medicine, and to explore how efforts to standardise these processes relate to professional and political understandings of science, social goods and personal ethics. By paying ethnographic attention to a range of sites where observation, experimentation and evaluation take place, my current work charts the range of research in the UK, explores differences across disciplines and clinical specialties, and considers what these activities and their results mean for social actors within the NHS. In particular, my research aims to enrichen our empirical understanding of the use of the trial technique for 'difficult cases', including what have become known as complex interventions for changing doctors', nurses' and patients' behaviour.
I am currently involved with two ethnographic projects which relate to these themes. One concerns a trial of implementation techniques to persuade general practitioners in a particular locality to intensify their efforts at what has become known as cardiovascular risk management. The second traces the emergence of a particular new technology, namely stem cell transplantation in heart failure. Here I am interested to understand the ways in which existing approaches to evidence shape the development of a potentially disruptive innovation by determining the kinds of experiments that are carried out at an early stage. I am also investigating patient expectations of the technique among participants in a single clinical trial.
I have an ongoing interest in the development of social policy and public participation at the European level, which began with my involvement in the third sector European policy network, based at the LSE.
Teaching
Catherine teaches core courses in quantitative and qualitative methodology to second year students in the Department. She also supervises third year projects and is interested in postgraduate supervision in the sociology of health, health policy, science or risk.
Selected publications
2009
Identifying Effectiveness in ‘The Old Old’: Principles and Values in the Age of Clinical Trials in Science, Technology and Human Values Volume 34 pp. 607-628
Third sector engagement with the Forum and Convention on the Future of Europe in The Third Sector Policy: Trans-european governance work in progress: a handbook Chapter 11 Edward Elgar
2007
The alchemy of clinical trials in Biosocieties Volume 2 pp. 85-99
2005
Arguing about the evidence: readers, writers and inscription devices in coronary heart disease risk assessment in Sociology of Health and Illness Volume 27 pp. 780-801
The challenges of translation (with Crowhurst, I, Larsson, O and Kendall, J) Jeremy Kendall, ed., in Exploring the engagement of European third sectors with the Forum and Convention on the Future of Europe London: Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics ISBN 0-753-01892-6