An Introduction To Medical Sociology

28.10.05

• Medical sociology explores how society shapes occurrence and experience of health and illness.
• IGS in medical education
-how do social class, ethnicity, gender, and age/life cycle affect occurrence/incidence and experience of health and illness?

Social class
• Social stratification is the fact that within society, there is usually a hierarchy of social groups.
• Social class is a form of stratification based upon economic differences.
• The concept is central to much of medical sociology research.

The relationship between health and social class
• Since the 1900s, there have been great improvements in health in the UK.
• However, despite improvements in medicine, social class differences persist and are getting worse.
• The upper social classes are getting healthier, living longer and experiencing less illness.
• The lower social classes are sicker and dying younger.

How do you measure a social class?
• The general measure is obtained by combining occupational groups with roughly equivalent skill and status.

Why?
1. Cultural/behavioural.
2. Materialist.
3. Social selection.
4. Artefactual.

Ethnicity
• Race
-Refers to a person's physical characteristics.
-Little meaning in terms of health - can have greater genetic variation within racial groups than between them.
• Ethnicity
-Denotes how groups of people who share similar histories behave etc.

Measuring ethnicity
• Most research on the health of minority ethnic populations relies on place of birth.
• Other approaches ask people to assign themselves.
• We need to think about the way that ethnicity is defined in studies reporting on the variable.

Variations in mortality
• Coronary heart disease
-Increased in people born in the Subcontinent.
-Increased in men born in the African Commonwealth.
• Death rates for cerebrovascular disease
-Increased in people born in Ireland