Upper Secondary School as an Innovative Health Laboratory: A Process Study About Exercise, Sport and Democracy in a Youth Culture

This chapter is a discussion of process-oriented methodology as a way of studying health promotion among young people in a Danish school setting. We will discuss this by presenting how we have applied process sociology in a health promotion intervention initiated by a Danish upper secondary school from 2010 to 2014, in which we explored the development process based on a democratic, participatory approach to health promotion. We applied Elias’s conceptualization of civilizing processes, focusing especially on the notions of figuration, interdependencies and power, to analyse the figuration of the school in a health promotion context on a macro level. Elias’s notion of the balance between I-, We- and They-identities as well as the distinction between established and outsider groups was also employed as a way to understand the power struggle between individuals and groups within the figuration on a micro level.