Health as a social construct
examines how an individuals context impacts upon their health status
. It recognises the interrelationship of the determinants of health and notes that many of the determinants are either out of the individual’s control, or made difficult to change because of their context.
Your understanding of perceptions of health as social constructs should identify that an individual’s interpretation of health is largely influenced by their: socioeconomic status (education, employment, income), sociocultural status (family, peers, media, religion, culture), and environment (geographical, political, …
Social constructionism is the theory that our knowledge and meaning is socially constructed.
Medical sociology studies social, political and cultural causes of health and illness and its consequences
. Medical sociologists believe the biomedical model of health and illness is deterministic.
Simply put, social constructs do not have inherent meaning. The only meaning they have is the meaning given to them by people. For example, the idea that
pink is for girls and blue is for boys
is an example of a social construct related to gender and the color of items.
How is health constructed?
You can learn more from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but here’s the gist: There are five factors that determine (un)health:
genes, behavior, social environment, physical environment, and access to health services
.
What Is a Social Contruct? A social construct is something that exists not in objective reality, but
as a result of human interaction
. It exists because humans agree that it exists. Some examples of social constructs are countries and money.
What is a construct in health?
The social construction of health and illness refers to
the ways our social world shapes the assessment, treatment, and collective understanding of various diseases and health conditions
.
He argues that
many mental health conditions are as much a social construct as medical diagnosis
, with doctors or therapists and their patients creating them together. “There are certainly serious conditions, like schizophrenia and manic depression, that are not a social construction,” says Borch-Jacobsen.
Social determinants of health are
the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age
. They include factors like socioeconomic status, education, neighborhood and physical environment, employment, and social support networks, as well as access to health care (Figure 1).
- Society. A society is a system that allows people in a region to get along in productive and peaceful cooperation.
- Law. …
- Economics. …
- Languages. …
- Concepts. …
- Culture. …
- Literature & Music. …
- Entertainment.
Social constructionism observes how
the interactions of individuals with their society and the world around them gives meaning to otherwise worthless things and creates the reality of the society
.
Process of social construction
Burger and Luckmann (1966) argue that social construction works in three stages,
externalization, objectification, and internalization
.
Social constructionism
provides an important counterpoint to medicine’s largely deterministic approaches to disease and illness
, and it can help us broaden policy deliberations and decisions. short, illness is not simply present in nature, wait- ing to be discovered by scientists or physicians.
Hypochondria: health anxiety, is worrying excessively that you are or may become seriously ill (Mayo Clinic). For people who suffer from health anxiety, the social construction of illness
offers a diagnosis, different perspective/outlook, another answer to symptoms, a second opinion, etc.
Social realism is
a term used to describe the approaches of sociologists who, accept there are a distinctive set of abnormal behaviour, which cause distress to individuals and to those around them
. These forms of abnormal behaviour are classified as mental illness.
| gender role cultural norm | femininity gender norm | masculinity tradition |
|---|
Knowledge Is Socially Constructed
In the realm of the sciences, this means that
although truth can be achieved within the confines of a given discipline, there is no over-arching truth that is more legitimate than any other
.
Social constructionism
provides a framework for understanding the constructed worlds that people inhabit
— useful for understanding social behavior, while postmodernism does not provide such a framework (Flaskas, 1995).
What are the constructs of the Health Belief Model?
There are six components of the Health Belief Model. These are
perceived severity, perceived susceptibility, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, cues to action, and self-efficacy
.
What is theoretical construct of health?
As one of the most widely applied theories of health behavior (Glanz & Bishop, 2010), the Health Belief Model (HBM) posits that six constructs predict health behavior:
risk susceptibility, risk severity, benefits to action, barriers to action, self-efficacy, and cues to action
(Becker, 1974; Champion & Skinner, 2008; …
The social model of health
examines all the factors which contribute to health such as social, cultural, political and the environment
. An example is poor housing: see diagram It is well documented that both stress and low self esteem can have a negative impact on health.
Depression is both biologically and socially constructed
. o There is a significant impact of the social environment on a person’s state of being.
Social constructivism about
psychiatry assumes that facts about mental disorders are, with respect
to what they, as such, explanatorily depend on, a bit-like facts about elections. Radical objectivism assumes that facts about mental disorders are, in this respect, more like facts about the evaporation of water.
Nonetheless, a larger body of evidence suggests that the prevalence of anxiety is due less to these pressures themselves than to a prevailing social ethos that teaches people that
anxiety-related symptoms are a socially and medically legitimate response to life in the modern age
.
