IMCA Research seminar - Anna Schneider-Kamp - University of Southern Denmark

Abstract:

In this talk, I introduce health capital as a sociological conceptual framework that conceptualizes health not as an individual outcome but as a socially embedded configuration of economic, social, cultural, behavioral, and symbolic resources that shape how people manage illness, engage in prevention, and navigate the growing commodification of health across institutional and marketplace contexts. For marketing and consumer researchers, health capital offers an analytically rich lens for understanding and explaining health-related consumption, decision-making, and inequalities.

The talk traces its operationalization, moving from sociological theory into empirical inquiry through in-depth qualitative research, followed by large-scale qualitative data collection using a health capital–based projective drawing task (the 12-Circles Drawing Technique) with AI-augmented analysis, and briefly outlining the subsequent development of the Health Capital Questionnaire (HCQ) as a multi-purpose, multi-dimensional instrument capturing observable indicators across six dimensions of health capital.

Bio:

Anna Schneider-Kamp (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Health and Consumption at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research is located at the nexus of medical sociology, consumer research, and digital health, with a strong interdisciplinary focus on how health, prevention, and inequalities are shaped by social structures, markets, and emerging technologies.

Anna has reconceptualized health capital from a Bourdieusian perspective. Her conceptualization theorizes how social, cultural, economic, and symbolic forms of capital shape individuals' positions and practices in the social field of health. Beyond this work, she investigates health practices, prevention strategies, patient empowerment, and the institutional and organizational transformations driven by digitalization and. A significant strand of her research critically examines the integration of artificial intelligence into healthcare, analyzing its implications for professional roles, decision-making, and power dynamics in clinical and workplace settings.

Anna is also a Work Package Leader in the EU Horizon Europe–funded Cancer Prevention at Work project, contributing to the development of interdisciplinary, evidence-based workplace interventions aimed at strengthening cancer prevention across Europe.

Please find more information about Anna here: https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/en/persons/anna/