Sociology Of Health Research Articles

The Role of Welfare State Characteristics for Health and Inequalities in Health from a Cross-National Perspective: A Critical Research Synthesis

Research in public health, epidemiology, and medical sociology has debated the health impacts of income inequality. A common hypothesis is that socioeconomic contexts in neighborhoods, regions, or entire nation states shape individuals’ health and inequalities in health. Several reviews have concluded that the distribution of income within a society contributes to poor health. More recent research has focused on welfare state arrangements and their relevance to cross-national variations in health and inequalities in health. We argue that the welfare state determines and mediates the extent of inequalities in health through healthcare, social policy and public health. Many studies have been published in the last decade that have tried to examine the role played by these influences on health and health inequalities. This review will (1) summarize the extant research on the association between welfare state factors and health outcomes, (2) discuss how research theorizes the role of welfare state characteristics for between- and within-country differences in health, (3) present different approaches to empirically investigate the association between welfare state, health and inequalities in health, and (4) provide methodological considerations in this field of research.

Socioeconomic inequalities of suicide: Sociological and psychological intersections

Suicide is complex; yet suicide research is dominated by ‘psy’ disciplines which can falter when seeking to explain social patterning of suicide rates, and how this relates to individual actions. This article discusses a multidisciplinary report which aimed to advance understandings of socioeconomic inequalities in suicide rates in the UK. Contrasts are drawn between health psychology and sociology. Important intersections are highlighted, including a lack of attention to socioeconomic inequalities, and an emphasis on adverse life experiences and emotions to understand inequalities and suicide. There are also curious disconnects, both within and between relevant psychological and sociological perspectives. The article argues that there are significant gaps in existing theorization regarding suicide, which can only be addressed through meaningful inter-disciplinary collaborations between sociologists, psychologists and others. Current theorization in mainstream suicide research is limited by its failure to engage with enduring, yet vitally important sociological debates regarding structure and agency, nature and culture.

A critical discourse analysis of how public participants and their evidence are presented in health impact assessment reports in Wales.

BackgroundHealth impact assessment (HIA) involves assessing in advance how projects affect the health of particular populations. In many countries, HIA has become central to attempts to better integrate health and public participation into policy and decision making. In 2017, HIA gained statutory status in Wales.This study considers how the public and their evidence are presented within HIA reports and what insights this offers into how public participation is constructed within public health.MethodsCritical discourse analysis, as described by Fairclough (2003), to analyse seven HIA reports produced in Wales.ResultsDiscourses were grouped under four headings. “Consensus and polyphony” relates to the tendency to produce consensus. “Authors and authority” is concerned with how participants and their evidence are shaped by different authorial stances. “Discussions, decisions and planes of action” brings together material on how decision makers are (or are not) brought into contact with evidence in the reports. “Evidence: fragmentation and compression” analyses strategies of abstracting.ConclusionsThis analysis suggests that participants and their evidence are presented in specific ways within HIA reports and that these are particularly shaped by genre, authorial stances and approaches to abstracting and re‐ordering texts. Acknowledging these issues may create opportunities to develop HIA in new directions. Further research to test these conclusions and contribute to a wider “sociology of public health documents” would be of value.

Book review: Madhu Nagla, Sociology of Health and Medicine

Madhu Nagla, Sociology of Health and Medicine. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2018, xv + 514 pp., ₹450 (paperback). ISBN: 978-81-316-0934-7.

Empathy as Care: the Model of Palliative Medicine

This article elaborates the ascent of what we call the empathy as care model in contemporary medicine. We make the following arguments: First, does empathy mean care? We examine this question in the context of medicine. We argue that empathy may not mean care throughout all medical practice, as findings from the medical education field show. However, empathy as care is rising in one specialty, palliative and hospice medicine. This specialty best represents the ideal-typical traits of the empathy as care model. This work contributes to the sociology of health and illness literature and to interpretivist sociological theorizing by examining empathy within the context of heath care meant to relieve pain and discomfort, often at the end of life, rather than curative medicine.

Blanchard, A. and Strand, R. (eds) Cancer Biomarkers: Ethics, Economics and Society, Kokstad: Megaloceros Press2017. 149pp ISBN 978‐82‐91851‐04‐4

Blanchard, A. and Strand, R. (eds) Cancer Biomarkers: Ethics, Economics and Society, Kokstad: Megaloceros Press2017. 149pp ISBN 978‐82‐91851‐04‐4

Biomedical and sociological approaches to mental health

Psychiatric epidemiological studies provide us with useful information about the prevalence of specific mental health problems in various countries and societies, but their biomedical attitude toward mental health does not allow us to focus on the study of the social factors of mental health. The biomedical direction is gradually changing and becoming more socially oriented, in particular, the psychiatric concept of mental disorders is changing to understanding them as dysfunctions, which already involves taking into account the discrepancy between man and the environment.Theories of social discontent explore various social, including value and economic, factors that give rise to mental health problems in modern societies. It should be noted that the problem of these theories lies in the fact that they consider discontent and social risks as a fundamental condition of modern life, and do not analyze them as a behavioral state or certain social variations. In addition, social theories ignore diversity in the manifestations of the mental health of people in different countries.Obviously, there is a need to form an independent direction of sociology – the sociology of health, which would not be reduced to epidemiological psychiatric studies, but would form its own system of terms and categories.First, the sociology of mental health requires the development of theories of specific mental disorders. Because of its orientation to biomedical ideas about health and disease, sociology is reluctant to develop specific theories of mental health.Secondly, the sociology of mental health should use a multi-level analysis of health factors and build macrosociological models of mental health.

Book review: Vikas Bajpai and Anoop Saraya, Health Beyond Medicine: Some Reflections on the Politics and Sociology of Health in India

Vikas Bajpai and Anoop Saraya, Health Beyond Medicine: Some Reflections on the Politics and Sociology of Health in India. Delhi: Aakar Books, 2018, 310 pp., ₹995, ISBN: 9789350025277 (Hardbound).

The Sociology of Global Health

Over the past two decades, a sociology of global health has emerged. While this new subfield takes up some themes and issues that are familiar to the discipline as a whole—among them organizations, social movements, and the social construction of illness—it has also posed new questions and opened new research pathways by formulating and testing theory in environments radically different from the United States. This work has forced sociologists to confront the ethnocentrism of research paradigms that are grounded in the American experience and to consider classical assumptions and constructs in fruitful new ways. Notable recent literature reviews have taken up the issue of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, comparative healthcare systems, and the sociology of development. However, this review is the first to outline the contours of a coherent sociology of global health. It addresses several questions: What issues are being taken up in this emergent subfield? What added value comes from turning scholarly attention beyond our borders? And what new research agendas lie on the horizon?

An Emergent Sociology of Global Health and Development

Sociologists have much to contribute to the study of global health and development. Our discipline's fundamental concerns with power and inequality uniquely position us to leverage theoretical, conceptual, substantive, and empirical insights for the understanding of engines, outcomes, and processes of global health and development. This special issue highlights the diversity and depth of sociological engagements with the topics of global health and development. In this introduction to this special issue, I briefly outline how sociologists have approached the study of global health and development despite the fact that this is a nascent and not yet fully coalesced field. While medical sociologists and political sociologists have historically studied these topics, they have also marginalized them. Exciting sociological research is, however, underway. The challenge is in ensuring that scholarship on global health and development is in conversation across subfields in order to propel research on global health and development forward, both substantively and theoretically.

High Socioeconomic Status Predicts Substance Use and Alcohol Consumption in U.S. Undergraduates

Background: In health sociology, the prevailing consensus is that socioeconomic status (SES) lowers illness risk. This model neglects the fact that unhealthful consumption patterns may covary with affluence. The current study examines consumption of drugs and alcohol among affluent U.S. college students. Objectives: The article tests the hypothesis that undergraduate students from high-SES households have higher rates and levels of drug and alcohol consumption than their peers. Methods: The study used self-report data from 18,611 18- to 24-year-old undergraduates across 23 public and private U.S. institutions from the Healthy Minds 2016 dataset. Results: I found that high-SES undergraduates were more likely than peers to use marijuana, choose varied drugs, consume alcohol frequently, and use alcohol and substances to cope with stress. The first three results were robust after controlling for gender, race, residence type, and relationship status. Marital status and race were stronger predictors than SES. Asians and married students were the least likely to use alcohol and drugs. Conclusions/Importance: Findings supported the main hypotheses, and the effects were robust to controls. Consumption of illicit drugs and alcohol may be one hitherto neglected reason for downward mobility among economically privileged college students.

Re-structuring the negotiated order of the hospital.

Researchers continue to lament the lack of organisational focus in the sociology of health and illness. Although studies have increasingly focused on boundaries between organizations, little such research has focused on the formal boundaries within the hospital itself. Given its dramatic compartmentalisation, and continuing prevalence in health systems, the lack of organisational perspective in hospital research limits insights into the effects (as well as the construction) of the order of health work and care. With a greater emphasis on 'ordering' in the concept of negotiated order, the aim of this study is to examine the manifestation and consequences of the formal boundaries of hospital departments. Fieldwork featured 12months of ethnography, including formal and informal observations, 80 audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews, and 56 field interviews, in the Emergency Departments (EDs) of two tertiary referral hospitals. Compared with in-patient hospital departments, the ED has limited legitimacy claims of organ-specific knowledge to transfer patients out of the ED. The manifestation of specialised knowledge hierarchies in organisational structures disadvantages patients who are older and who have chronic conditions, underpinning the argument that effects as well as the negotiation of stable organisational orders deserve increased attention in the sociology of health and illness.

The Future of Quantitative Approaches in Health and Medical Sociology: Needs for Collaborations with Other Disciplines

The Future of Quantitative Approaches in Health and Medical Sociology: Needs for Collaborations with Other Disciplines

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis in the Health and Medical Sociology

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis in the Health and Medical Sociology

When Health Care is Displaced by State Interests: Building Dialogue Through Shared Findings.

Health sociologists interested in how macro state influences affect micro health care practices have much to gain from meta-ethnography research. In this article, we bring together insights from two separate empirical studies on state health care services involving HIV/AIDS as a way to speak to larger issues about the organization and production of medical expertise and governance in health care systems. We use Noblit and Hare's meta-ethnography approach to bring these studies into conversation and identify six shared "organizers" of health care encounters. The organizers illustrate how state health interests operate across institutional contexts and impact the work of providers in seemingly unrelated health care settings. On the basis of this synthesis, we conclude that state interests both structure and create conflict in health care settings. We believe this perspective offers the potential to advance the goals of health sociology and the field of qualitative health research in general.

Sociology, biology and mechanisms in urban mental health

This paper examines the way in which sociology and biology continue to struggle to understand why urban life creates high levels of mental disorder. The movement of the world population to be majority urban in recent years adds urgency to this issue. The paper addresses ways in which sociological analysis and biological analysis might work together through the identification of mechanisms, imagined and confirmed through data, of the way in which urban life gets ‘under the skin’. The argument moves from the use of mechanisms in scientific explanation, to the shortcomings of epidemiology, and the possibility of a new ‘mechanism-rich’ epidemiology. It then discusses seven examples of work that might contribute to this effort, concluding that more careful ethnography is required.

Sociology of Health and Illness – Mildred Blaxter New Writer Prize

Sociology of Health and Illness – Mildred Blaxter New Writer Prize

Improvement of Blood Flow in Peripheral Circulation with Magnetic Therapy and a Discussion from Viewpoints of Preventive Medicine and Health Sociology(Research Paper,The 38th Symposium on Life Information Science)

Improvement of Blood Flow in Peripheral Circulation with Magnetic Therapy and a Discussion from Viewpoints of Preventive Medicine and Health Sociology(Research Paper,The 38th Symposium on Life Information Science)

Low sense of coherence is associated with anxiety among adults: Results based on data from all 47 prefectures of Japan

BackgroundAnxiety disorder is a major societal, economic, and healthcare burden, so it is essential to identify underlying risk factors. Sense of coherence (SOC), defined as an individual's perceived ability to control events and cope with challenges, is strongly associated with healthcare outcomes. MethodsThis study investigated the association between SOC and anxiety among adults in all 47 prefectures of Japan using a cross-sectional online panel survey. SOC was assessed using the University of Tokyo Health Sociology version of the SOC Scale and anxiety was assessed using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) scale. ResultsAmong 2100 participants (1051 males and 1049 females), 475 (22.6%) were identified with anxiety (scoring 8 points or higher on the GAD-7 scale). Before adjustment for potential confounders, there was a significant negative association between SOC and presence of anxiety. Even after adjustment, the presence of anxiety was significantly higher among the lower SOC subgroup than the higher SOC subgroup. ConclusionsThese results indicate that approximately one-fifth of adults in Japan suffer from anxiety and that low SOC is a significant risk factor.

Living a Deportation Threat: Anticipatory Stressors Confronted by Undocumented Mexican Immigrant Women

Previous sociological research shows that exposure to stress varies by individuals’ social statuses and is a central mechanism in producing mental health disparities. This line of research suggests that ethnoracial groups are more exposed to racial discrimination, thus negatively impacting their mental health. There has also been a growing literature showing how legal status impacts the mental health of immigrants and their families. However, the sociology of mental health and migration literature has largely remained disparate. This paper bridges these literatures to highlight how living a deportation threat manifests itself as an anticipatory stressor that negatively impacts undocumented Mexican migrant women’s access to resources, social relationships, and social roles. Based on 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews with undocumented Mexican immigrant women from Houston, Texas, my findings reveal living a deportation threat is a perpetual anticipatory stressor that intensifies the effects of avoiding authorities, family fragmentation, and economic uncertainty. I argue this anticipatory stressor transforms into a chronic stressor that undocumented Mexican women confront daily. By situating this study within an anti-immigrant social context, it highlights the social processes and mechanisms that exacerbate the stressors undocumented Mexican immigrant women confront.