During the last decades, the globalization process and the macro-regional integration (European, African, Southern-American, etc.) have made increasingly available a set of sources of data, collected by the international agencies (OECD, WHO, EU, etc.) and the national governments, previously quite difficult to find, making comparative research increasingly widespread in the field of the Sociology of Health and Medicine, with particular reference to the social inequalities in health. This development raises a set of questions: about the notion of 'comparison' itself, about the most convenient research strategies to be pursued, about the problem of the micro-macro levels and the unit of analysis and about the comparability of the tools and of the sources used.
This volume tries to shed light on the controversial distinction between qualitative and quantitative methodologies in sociological research on health. Together with a deep analysis of the multi-level statistical models, the qualitative methods are also investigated. Moreover, a systematic review on the researches which use two of the main international sources - namely the European Social Survey and the ISSP (International Social Survey Program) model of multinational survey - is proposed. A panel discussion on the state-of-the-art of comparative research in the Sociology of Health and Medicine in Italy, two comparative researches by Italian scholars and an assessment of the different typologies of health systems complete the series of contributions.

The European Society for Health and Medical Sociology (Eshms) is a scientific society founded in 1984, including scholars working in the academic context in different European countries, with the aim of establishing new chances of scientific and cultural exchange about the social problems of health-illness, medicine, health systems, especially by its bi-annual congress which takes place every time in a different European town.

Guido Giarelli, Associate Professor of Sociology of Health at Università "Magna Graecia" in Catanzaro, has been elected President of the Eshms for the period 2007-2010.