This book has three aims. One is to provide an account of a research project concerning the health and wellbeing of women and their babies that began in 1983 and continues today. The second aim is to contextualize this account within ‘a sociology of the research process’ (Platt 1976) that centres on the telling of a story about how and why the research came into being, and what happened when it did. Both the descriptive and the analytic aims of the book are grounded in its third major focus, which is an epistemological one, concerning the status and gendering of knowledge in the contemporary capitalist world.

The story unfolded in the book, and the details of the narrative it encloses, link a wide variety of different concerns about knowledge, policy and practice in the contemporary industrialized world. Some of the major issues addressed in the book are:

• 1. What ‘is’ health? How far do variations in the social environment, including people's social relationships and networks, ‘explain’ differences in health status between individuals and groups?

• 2. What are the possibilities and limits of professionalized medical care as a strategy for promoting health?

• 3. When women have children, what is the role of professionalized health care on the one hand, and of the social environment on the other, in helping them to do so?

• 4. To what extent do professional definitions of the ‘normal’ distort people's experiences of their bodies and their social identities, and what has the concept of ‘risk’ to do with this?

• 5. What is the epistemological basis of the methods used by social scientists to advance knowledge? What ‘is’ knowledge, anyway?

• 6. Why are methods of contributing to advances in knowledge commonly divided into quantitative and qualitative? How does this division work in practice?

• 7. What is the relationship between social science research, academic knowledge and public policy?

‘The real problem’

When I say this book will address these issues, I do not mean it will provide any easy answers. Like Martin Hammersley (1989: 6) in his account of the origins and dilemmas of the qualitative method in social science, I warn the reader now that there is no point in turning to the end of this book to find solutions to the problems posed - the reader will be disappointed.