ArticleSociology of health & illness2019
Making sense with numbers. Unravelling ethico-psychological subjects in practices of self-quantification.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Future-Making From Afar: Digital Twins in Medicine.Sociology of health & illness · 2026Article
- (Self)care by Numbers: Self-Monitoring Technology and the Technology of a UK Public Health Trial.Medical anthropology · 2025Article
- Challenges facing the clinical adoption of a new prognostic biomarker: a case study.BioSocieties · 2023Article
- Digital health: A sociomaterial approach.Sociology of health & illness · 2023Article
- Trouble with autonomy in behavioral insurance.The British journal of sociology · 2022Article
- Frying eggs or making a treatment plan? Frictions between different modes of caring in a community mental health team.Sociology of health & illness · 2021Article
- User types, psycho-social effects and societal trends related to the use of consumer health technologies.Digital healthReview
- The social grounds of self-tracking in insurance: A mixed-method approach to adoption and use.Digital healthArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prevention enthusiasts show great optimism about the potential of health apps to modify peoples' lifestyles through the tracking and quantification of behaviours and bodily signs. Critical sociologists warn for the disciplining effects of self-tracking. In this paper we use an empirical ethics approach to study the characteristics and strivings of the various types of 'ethico-psychological subjects' that emerge in practices of self-quantification by analysing how people and numbers relate in three cases of self-quantification: in prevention discourse, in testimonies from the quantified self (QS) movement and in empirical work we did with people with Diabetes type I and with 'every day self-trackers'. We show that a free subject that needs support to enact its will is crucial to understand the optimism about prevention. In the QS-movement the concern is with a lack of objective and personalised knowledge about imperceptible processes in the body. These subjects are decentered and multiplied when we trace how numbers in their turn act to make sense of people in our empirical study. We conclude that there are many different types of ethico-psychological subjects in practices of self-tracking that need to be explored in order to establish what good these practices of self-quantification might do.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.