Making sense of COVID-19: manifestations of health capital during the pandemic Ş.Erhan Bağcı, Şengül Erden, Begüm Yengel BMC Public Health, 2024 Background Grounded in Bourdieu's theory of human practice, this study aims to examine how individuals as social agents made sense of and acted upon their COVID-19 experiences. A recent conceptualization of health capital is utilized to explain the practices of patients in the pandemic, in relation to their biographical background. Methods This is a qualitative research in which the data were collected by biographical narrative interviews through a theoretical sampling approach. Eighteen interviews with COVID-19 patients were conducted and 8 of them were analyzed by the Documentary Method. Results The informants made sense of their illness experiences through their health capital, which is manifested in their self-perception of health, their attitudes towards the healthcare system, their conception of terms such as luck, their work status, and the gendered division of labour at home in the COVID-19 pandemic. All the manifestations are mediated by the social, cultural, and economic capital of the informants, and their habitual practices are based on their symbolic capital. Conclusion The study depicts how social agents’ health capital manifested in the pandemic, relying on their symbolic capital, and shaping their practices. Further research across diverse contexts is needed to fully understand extra dimensions of health capital as a descriptor of the social determinants of health.
Migration and Participation in Adult Education: The Matthew Effect on Immigrants Şükrü Erhan Bağcı Adult Education Quarterly, 2019 The Matthew Effect has been one of the best known principles in adult education, implying that the ones who have more formal education at earlier phases of life participate more in education in adulthood. This qualitative research explores how the Matthew Effect works under migration, focusing on the experiences of the Turkish immigrants in Germany. The documentary analyses of the narrative interviews in the study reveal that the Matthew Effect among immigrants works depending on the formation of the immigrant habitus. The factors to mediate the making of the immigrant habitus are social and cultural capital, gender, the hysteresis effect, and affections such as expectations from the host society, biographical regrets, and the sense of belonging to the collective identity of the immigrants.
Decline of meritocracy: Neo-feudal segregation in Turkey Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2015
