Medical Sociology Research Articles

Contributors

Previous articleNext article FreeContributorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBarbara Entwisle is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a social demographer whose research focuses on migration in relation to life course processes and in the context of changing social, natural, and built environments.Ashton M. Verdery is assistant professor of sociology, demography, and social data analytics at Pennsylvania State University. His research examines interactions between demographic change, social networks, and health and frequently relies on computational social science methods.Nathalie Williams is associate professor of sociology and international studies and an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and the South Asian Center at the University of Washington. Her work primarily focuses on the demographic and social consequences of climate change and armed conflict.Dohoon Lee is associate professor of sociology at Yonsei University, South Korea. His research centers on social stratification, demography, life course, and causal inference. He is interested in how nonlinear, asymmetric regularities arise in social relations and their implications for social inequality.Byungkyu Lee is assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University. He studies network dynamics in the field of medical sociology and political sociology. He is currently using large-scale medical claims and other administrative data to explain the rise of “deaths of despair” in the United States; he is examining the impact of state policy on the opioid epidemic and pharmaceutical payments to doctors. His other works investigate the co-evolution of cultural beliefs, networks, and political polarization using surveys and social media data.Nicole P. Marwell is associate professor of social service administration and sociology at the University of Chicago. Her research examines questions of urban governance, with a current focus on how different forms of knowledge—such as experimental evidence, political claims, and data analytics—are deployed in contested governance processes.Erez Aharon Marantz is a lecturer of sociology at Tel Aviv University. He uses computational methods to study transformations of markets and industries, and the way organizations and individuals motivate, and react to, these large-scale changes. His recent work focuses on how status mobility shapes innovation and on the emergence of professional communities in project-based labor markets. He received his PhD from New York University in 2019.Delia Baldassarri is professor of sociology at New York University. Her research interests are in social networks, political sociology, economic sociology, and analytical sociology. She is currently investigating the emergence of cooperation in complex societies, focusing on the effects of ethnic diversity and market integration on prosocial behavior.Nicholas Sabin is associate professor at the Facultad de Administración y Economía at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile and an international research fellow at the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on behavioral science and decision making, conducted with the Center for Experimental Social Sciences in Oxford and Santiago.Felix Reed-Tsochas is professor of complex systems at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. His research is highly interdisciplinary and uses computational and mathematical methods to model complex systems and networks. Current applications include the impact on health outcomes of nosocomial patient-patient contacts, the social and behavioral etiology of antimicrobial resistance in developing countries, studies of social influence in online platforms, the use of cellphone data to track social interactions, and complexity in supply networks. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 125, Number 6May 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709744 Views: 170 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Gendered tri-racial stratification and health disparities

Despite extensive evidence confirming racial and gender health disparities, little research considers how race theory might aid in understanding these patterns. Using the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES), this study fills this void by integrating two research areas—sociology of race and medical sociology—to assess the utility of Bonilla-Silva's tri-racial stratification perspective in predicting health patterns. More specifically, I address the following questions: is the tri-racial stratification thesis aligned with the health profiles of racial groups in the U.S.? Does the applicability of this perspective differ for women and men? Last, do the health patterns suggested by tri-racial stratification persist after adjusting for social factors (socioeconomic status and social support) often invoked to explain health disparities? Results indicate that the racial patterning of life-threatening conditions lend partial support for tri-racial stratification for women and men. Self-rated health findings yield counterintuitive patterns. Furthermore, social factors do not explain the majority of ethnic differences in health. Research and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Modified BG Prasad Socio-economic Classification, Updated – 2020

SES of a family is often an important parameter of measurement in various health studies. Socioeconomic status is an important tool which influences the accessibility, affordability, acceptability, availability and utilization of various resources. The concept of socio-economic status is widely used in medical sociology.

The medical sociology and the sport sociology in Poland – the dissimilar twins

The article concerns the medical sociology of and the sport sociology in Poland. Despite some similarities (cooperation with institutional fields outside the humanities, partial sharing of the subject of interest and dealing with various dysfunctions in this area, the applicative nature of their research and analysis, emergence at a similar time), an important difference can be noticed in the academic functioning of both sub-disciplines, including their attractiveness for subsequent generations of sociology students. The purpose of the article is to identify the reasons for this situation. The global conditions analysed by the author include greater interest of the classic authors of sociology in the discussion of medicine rather than sport, the depreciation of sport as a subject of sociological reflection, as well as a different level of prestige of the disciplines with which the specific sociologies cooperate. Among the national determinants of the relatively weaker academic establishment of the sport sociology is the fact that – in contrast to the medical sociology – it developed in a certain isolation from the general sociological milieu, and did not manage to avoid ideological entanglements.

'You're basically calling doctors torturers': stakeholder framing issues around naming intersex rights claims as human rights abuses.

In this article we address activist, patient advocate and medic perspectives on framing intersex, variations of sex characteristics and disorders/differences in sex development medical treatment as human rights abuses. Problematic aspects of intersex medical treatment have increasingly been highlighted in national debates and international human rights bodies. Some intersex activists have framed aspects of intersex medical treatment as human rights abuses since the 1990s. Other stakeholders in shaping medical treatment, such as patient advocates and medical professionals, are not always content with human rights framing, or even the term intersex. In order to address the different perspectives in this arena we provide background on the primary rights claims that have arisen followed by key human rights framing of these claims. We provide a short discussion of activism styles, looking at pan-intersex social movements and variation-specific patient associations as different styles of health social movements. The analysis of stakeholder perspectives on the use of human rights strategy in health areas provides a useful case study for medical sociology and policy in general.

Perception of Healthy Lifestyle Among Students of Medical Schools

Abstract Introduction/Aim: The aim of the present study was to evaluate ideas and motivational attitudes of medical school students towards a healthy lifestyle and its components. Methods: The study was conducted from March until August 2017, at the Department of Medical Sociology, Healthcare Economics and Health Insurance and at N.A. Semashko Public Health and Healthcare Department, I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University. We ran a medical and sociological survey in 984 randomly selected students from eight Russian medical universities. Results: The article presents the results of the medical and sociological study aimed at assessing the ideas and motivational attitudes of medical students towards healthy lifestyle and its elements. Our research showed that students of medical schools, while recognizing the importance of preserving their own health, are still largely committed to an unhealthy lifestyle, secondly, they refuse sports activities even more often, and, thirdly, they prove not to be active enough when it comes to disease prevention and health preservation. Conclusion: Taking into consideration the obtained results, healthy lifestyle among students of medical schools is an exception rather than common practice.

Race-Ethnicity, Social Roles, and Mental Health: A Research Update.

Social role involvement engenders sense of purpose and meaning to life, which sustains positive mental health. Racism within American society, however, results in experiences that disadvantage ethnoracial minorities, thus making it likely that social roles do not have universal remunerations. Using the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (N = 12,526), this study explores the association between role participation and psychological distress across nine ethnoracial groups. Results indicate that engaging in many roles is associated with better mental health for all ethnoracial groups. However, the combination of social roles has distinct effects for certain groups. We discuss the implications of the study findings for medical sociology, in general, and the social roles literature, in particular.

Medical diagnosis of dyslexia in a Swedish elite school: A case of "consecrating medicalization".

Based on qualitative data of an upper-secondary school in Sweden's primary elite community, Djursholm, I propose how medical diagnosis of students as dyslexics contributes to consecrating them by offering a short cut to successful performance, while at the same time reproducing differences between social classes. The study suggests how students that do not score top can be labeled dyslexic and the social and moral consequences of that. I introduce the concept of "consecrating medicalization" in order to discriminate between the effects of medical diagnosis of members of different social classes. In this way, this paper contributes to further examining some key problems in medical sociology and the sociology of elites, by offering a framework of synthesis and integration.

Medical Psychology and Medical Sociology in Transition - Review and Perspectives of the two Disciplines in Germany

Through the Master Plan for Medical Studies 2020 and the development of the National Competence-Based Learning Target Catalogue Medicine (NKLM), significant changes in university medicine were started. The aim of the study was a systematic analysis of the state and perspectives of the disciplines of medical psychology and sociology at the medical faculties in Germany. An online survey was conducted on 5 topics (structure, teaching, research, care, perspectives). 46 departments and institutes of medical psychology and sociology were invited to the survey. 40 of the 46 contacted institutions have called up the online questionnaire, 35 have answered in full (return: 76.1%). 77% of the institutions are autonomous. In the median, the institutions have 15 employees (range: 1 to 149). 9 universities have established a model curriculum. More than half of the institutions use and train simulation patients. The main research priorities are clinical research, health care research, neuroscience and classical medical psychology or sociological research topics. The institutions receive primarily public funding and publish 19 publications (80% international, median) each year. Publication opportunities are considered "satisfactory" by 54% of institutions (2003: 44%), and by 29% as "very satisfactory" (2003: 21%). 9 out of 27 medical psychology institutes provide clinical services to patients and relatives with mental or chronic physical illness. Almost half of the institutions expect the Master Plan 2020 to further increase the relevance of the subjects. Since 2003 there has been a substantial increase in scientific staff, third-party funding and publications. The sites show a pronounced heterogeneity in terms of size and equipment, which leads to an imbalance in terms of teaching and research as well as clinical services. The subjects of medical psychology and medical sociology have developed very heterogeneously in terms of independence, size, equipment and possibilities at the various faculties in Germany. Therefore, it is very important in the future that the 2 disciplines intensify the dialogue with each other and also with other psychosocial disciplines in order to influence the current development regarding NKLM and Master Plan 2020 constructively. On the one hand, this calls for an expansion of disadvantaged institutions and a consolidation of the existing autonomous institutions.

Using qualitative research articles to talk about gender and race inequities in health care

Using peer-reviewed articles, this activity informs students of experiences female-identifying patients encounter in health-care contexts. The activity draws the students’ attention to gendered and racial prejudices and how those could impact patients’ relationship with practitioners. Courses: Suitable for undergraduate courses, such as Gender and Women's Studies, Interpersonal Communication, Medical Sociology, Communication Research Methods, Health Communication, Qualitative Research Methods, Race and Ethnicity, and Sociology of Gender. Objectives: After completing this unit activity, students will learn how to (1) analyze the impact of race and gender on patients, (2) advocate for female-identifying patients, (3) help create more welcoming and equitable interactions in health care, and (4) advocate for themselves within the health-care context.

The Relationship of Medical Sociology to Sociological Theory: Its Historical Root, Contributions and Contemporary Development

The nexus of this study was to examine the Relationship of Medical Sociology to Sociological Theory, its historical root, contributions and Contemporary Development. Medical sociology is a relatively new sub-discipline of the general field of sociology; today medical sociologists comprise one of the largest groups of sociologists in the world. Medical sociology began with a different orientation when compared to sociology’s “core” fields. Unlike religion, law, politics, modes of economic production, and basic social processes, medicine was ignored by sociology’s early theorists because it was not an institution shaping society. Medical sociology did not come of age until the late 1940s and early 1950s in an intellectual climate far different from sociology’s traditional specialties with direct roots in nineteenth century social thought. Consequently, medical sociology evolved in circumstances dissimilar to those of most other sociological sub-disciplines. The notion that medical sociology is theoretical is wrong. Thus, this paper has provided a brief account of the history and variety of viewpoints in sociological theory that have been utilized within the field of medical sociology and has provided influential statements on the relationship between society and health. Beginning with Parsons and structural functionalism, medical sociology in reality has a rich theoretical tradition spanning almost 60 years and incorporating the work of both classical and contemporary theorists.

Reviewing and Overseeing the Japanese Journal of Health and Medical Sociology

Reviewing and Overseeing <i>the Japanese Journal of Health and Medical Sociology</i>

Present Status of the Japanese Society of Health and Medical Sociology: Focusing on Research to the Future

Present Status of the Japanese Society of Health and Medical Sociology: Focusing on Research to the Future

Application to the “Nursing” of Health and Medical Sociology

Application to the “Nursing” of Health and Medical Sociology

From the Analysis of the Back Issues of the Japanese Journal of Health and Medical Sociology

From the Analysis of the Back Issues of the Japanese Journal of Health and Medical Sociology

Reconsidering Two Types of Health and Medical Sociology in Japan: Multiformity and Continuity That Maintain Interdisciplinarity

Reconsidering Two Types of Health and Medical Sociology in Japan: Multiformity and Continuity That Maintain Interdisciplinarity

Trends and a Practice of Teaching Health and Medical Sociology

Trends and a Practice of Teaching Health and Medical Sociology

THE APPROACH OF MEDICAL MALPRACTICE PHENOMENON WITHIN THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF MEDICAL SOCIOLOGY

The medical malpractice represents a phenomenon which is more and more debated in the Romanian society; its connection with a series of other phenomena as those of the migration of physicians or decrease of physicians’ credibility in the eyes of the public opinion can represent individual research subjects. The medical care has become a more complex process both by the social and economic developments (digitalization, technological development, demographic changes) and by the awareness at social level concerning the weak points and lacks the care systems. The higher costs of the medical care, the change of the physician - patient relationship, the ease access to online information, the unequal distribution of resources for health, the social inequity concerning the cares for health represent subjects from the area of medical sociology. The sociological approach of processes and phenomenon related to the medical treatments represent a useful systematic approach for their understanding or for the development of some adequate social policies. The objective of this paper is the identification of the ways in which the phenomenon of medical malpractice is represented in the theoretical field of sociology.

Mobilizing Mutations

In his book, MobilizingMutations: Human Genetics in the Age of Patient Advocacy, Daniel Navon, of University of California, San Diego, gives a thought-provoking sociological analysis of the history of medical genetics from the beginning to this date, examining the impact of genetics-based diagnosis on individuals, families, advocacy organizations, and the society. His aim is to apply qualitative biomedical research “to examine the conditions, organizations, and people who exemplify genomic designation.” The focus of this 384-page book, which is divided into an introduction, 8 chapters, each with its own conclusion, and a summarizing conclusion, is the emergence of genomically designated conditions representing the nexus between medical genetics and sociology. Genomic designation is classifying disease based on genetic mutations rather than by clinical symptoms. Today, the vast majority of inherited conditions are defined by symptom-based diagnostic criteria, even though a significant number of the condition-associated mutations have been identified. By contrast, in genomic designation, the only criterion for diagnosis is the presence of a particular genetic mutation. This approach defines pathological syndromes by genomic analysis de novo. The author, using examples of psychiatric conditions, demonstrates how disease categories can be “lumped together, split up, or recalibrated” based on genomic designation. Navon argues that while early genetics findings had little impact on clinical practice, mutations linked to genomically designated conditions have become powerful factors because of their “social mobilization,” starting from networks of medical professionals and patient support and advocacy groups, and up to the creation of registered foundations, and to the attraction of public and private funding for the research. Moreover, genomically designated conditions create frameworks to attract biomedical researchers and pharmaceutical companies working on biological models that can help to decipher the pathophysiology of more common genetically complex medical conditions. As of 2017, there were more than 20 genomically designated conditions with established advocacy organizations. Most of these inherited conditions are the result of chromosomal abnormalities, such as aneuploidies, microdeletions, and duplications, with only a few linked to point mutations. Many more novel genetic syndromes have been reported within the past several years, and some of them are becoming a focus of effective social mobilization and community formation, such as mechanistic target of rapamycin kinase gene (MTOR) mutations (Smith-Kingsmore syndrome). However, an important issue is that a genomically designated condition is open to encompassing a vast range of phenotypic variations present in the mutation carriers; it can include not only mutation-associated disease phenotypes, but also subclinical traits in some of the healthy carriers, thus blurring the boundary between illness and health. Incomplete penetrance as an all-or-none diagnostic approach should be replaced by continuums of impairment variation. Endophenotyping (observation of nuanced signs of difference observed in significant proportion of people with a particular genetic mutation) allows normalizing pathological findings because “a finding that is pathological in the general population may be part of the normal development trajectory for people with a particular mutation.” In the postgenomic era, next-generation sequencing technologies have made feasible a diagnosis based on patients’ whole-exome (WES) or whole-genome (WGS) sequencing findings; publicly available databases such as OMIM, DECIPHER, ClinVar, ExAc, and others allow rapid bioinformatics evaluation of the newly identified mutations. Social media and other communication technologies drastically accelerate the formation of novel mutation-based groups of patients (ie, emergence of novel genetically designation conditions). It is noteworthy that only a small minority of these novel conditions have been mobilized yet. The author argues that the future of genomically designated conditions remains uncertain because of several factors, the main of which is an increasing availability of noninvasive prenatal genetic screening (NIPT), resulting in lower prevalence of genetic disorders in the future. He writes that “the specter of eugenics is a serious cause of concern” in relation to genomically designated mutations, most of which are now included in NIPT kits. Navon mentions some other debatable issues, such as the potential for iatrogenic harm, self-fulfilling prophecies for mutation carriers, a prospect of a higher ratio of genetic disorders in socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, and an ethical issue of seeing mildly affected people as patients of a genetic disorder. In summary, the book is well organized and written in a clear and straightforward language, presenting a novel perspective in perception of genetic disorders. It will be equally interesting to social scientists and medical professionals and to a diverse audience, including those whose lives are affected by a genetic disorder, who are interested in medical genetics, or who are involved with biomedical and social issues related to genetic disorders. Sheila Riazi, MSc, MDNatalia Kraeva, PhDDepartment of Anesthesia and Pain ManagementUniversity Health NetworkUniversity of TorontoOntario, Canada[email protected]

Uncertainty work as ontological negotiation: adjudicating access to therapy in clinical psychology.

Across the UK, wide‐ranging efforts have been made to enhance citizen access to psychological therapy. Clinical psychologists are key providers of and gatekeepers for therapy. This article is concerned with how clinical psychologists foster access (or not) to psychological care. More specifically, it interrogates how psychologists manage, and make decisions around, patient referrals. Following a referral, psychologists must resolve an uncertain situation: should they accept a referral and continue with an assessment? Thereafter, they must decide whether a patient is suitable for their service – and for therapy more generally. Certainty is synthesised against a backdrop of sometimes powerful pressures to meet service targets. Taking cues from medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS), this article interrogates some of the uncertainties around access to psychological therapy, and how decisions made by clinical psychologists involve negotiations of patient, service and professional ontologies. To do so, it draws on interviews with 40 psychologists across England and Scotland. The paper spotlights a professional group that is often absent from or only dimly lit within sociological observation and analysis: clinical psychology. Through attending to the discourses of psychologists, I extend conversations about uncertainty through a distinctive case study.