ABSTRACT
The concept of lay knowledge is a recent development of the idea of lay beliefs. The study of people’s beliefs about illness, health and medical care initially provided a way of understanding different forms of ‘illness behaviour’ and ‘lay referral’, particularly where ‘non-compliant’ behaviour suggested differences between the patient’s perspectives and those of his or her physician. Research on these themes provided an empirical foundation for the argument that a patient’s behaviour was influenced by his or her beliefs, and that these beliefs were a reasoned attempt to deal with the sometimes intensely contradictory demands of illness and its treatment in everyday life (Robinson 1973). However, beliefs are more than antecedents to individual behaviour, and a second line of thought was beginning to conceptualise lay beliefs about health and illness as social representations, with distinctive form and content (Herzlich 1973; Blaxter 1983; Williams 1986).
