Screening is a well-established tool to advance earlier cancer diagnosis. We used Davison’s concept of ‘candidacy’ to explore how individuals draw on collectively constructed images of ‘typical’ colorectal cancer (CRC) sufferers, or ‘candidates’, in order to evaluate their own risk and to ascertain the impact of candidacy on screening participation in CRC. We interviewed 61 individuals who were invited to participate in the Scottish Bowel Screening Programme. Of these, 37 were screeners (17 men and 20 women) and 24 non-screeners (13 men and 11 women). To analyse these data we used a coding frame that drew on: symptoms, risk factors, and retrospective and prospective candidacy. Few participants could identify a definite bowel cancer candidate and notions of candidacy were largely predicated on luck in the sense that anyone could be a candidate for CRC and there was little evidence to support a linear relationship between feelings of risk and screening decisions. Often participants described screening as part of a wider portfolio of being healthy and referred to feeling obliged to look after themselves. Our study suggests that rather than candidates for bowel cancer, screeners viewed themselves as candidates for screening by which screening decisions pointed towards the acceptance and normalisation of the rhetoric of personal responsibility for health. These findings have related theoretical and practical implications; the moral structure that underpins the new public health can be witnessed practically in the narratives by which those who see themselves as candidates for screening embrace wider positive health practices.

筛查是一种完善的工具，可以促进早期癌症诊断。我们使用戴维森（Davison）的“候选资格”概念来探索个人如何借鉴集体构建的“典型”结肠直肠癌（CRC）患者或“候选者”图像，以评估其自身风险并确定候选资格对筛查参与的影响在CRC中。我们采访了61位受邀参加苏格兰肠筛查计划的人士。其中，有37位筛查者（17位男性和20位女性）和24位非筛查者（13位男性和11位女性）。为了分析这些数据，我们使用了一个编码框架，该编码框架的依据是：症状，危险因素以及回顾性和前瞻性候选资格。很少有参与者能够确定出确切的肠癌候选者，而候选资格的概念很大程度上是靠运气来预测的，因为任何人都可以成为CRC的候选者，而且几乎没有证据支持风险感与筛查决定之间的线性关系。通常，参与者将筛查描述为更健康的投资组合的一部分，并提到必须自己照顾自己的感觉。我们的研究表明，筛查人员不是筛查肠胃癌的候选人，而是将自己视为筛查的候选人，通过筛查决定，筛查决策指向接受个人健康责任的言论并使其正常化。这些发现具有相关的理论和实践意义；