Dear Colleagues
Info below on paper in latest issue of Sociology of Health and Illness
which may be of interest to some of you
David McDaid
LSE Health and Social Care
The determinants of health: structure, context and agency
Gareth H. Williams Sociology of Health & Illness; Volume 25, Issue 3, Page
131 http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.00344
Abstract
The concept of social structure is one of the main building blocks of the
social sciences, but it lacks any precise technical definition within
general sociological theory. This paper reviews the way in which the
concept has been deployed within medical sociology, arguing that in recent
times it has been used primarily as a frame for the sociological
interpretation of health inequalities and their social determinants. It
goes on to examine the contribution that medical sociologists have made to
the debate over health inequalities, giving particular attention to
contributions to Sociology of Health and Illness. These have often provided
a focus for discussions outside or critical of the mainstream debates that
have been driven primarily by epidemiologists. The paper reviews some of
the main points of criticism of epidemiological approaches, focusing in
particular on the methodological constraints that limit the capacity of
epidemiologists to develop more theoretically satisfactory accounts of the
inter-relationships of social structure, context and agency in their impact
on health and well being. Some recent examples from the Journal of more
theoretically innovative and analytically fine-grained approaches to
understanding the impact of social structure on health are then explored.
The paper concludes with an argument for a more historically-informed
analysis of the relationships between social structure and health, using
the knowledgeable narratives of people in places as a window onto those
relationships.
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