SOCIAL FACTORS IN HEALTH & ILLNESS

This course will explore health, illness, and health care from a sociological perspective. The course is organized into four major parts. The first part will focus on how social structure influences the occurrence of illness and why some social groups suffer more sickness and diseases than others. In the second part of the course, we will explore the "illness experience." That is, we will discuss different models of illness and how people decide when they are sick, respond and cope with the symptoms of various diseases, and make decisions about when and from whom to seek help. In the third part of the course we will examine the profession of medicine, types of health care providers and medical technologies and bioethics. Finally, we will examine the challenges facing our U.S. health care system. In sum, this course will explore each of these issues and help improve your understanding of the many ways that society affects health and illness. This course is designed to serve as an introductory survey course to the field of medical sociology, sometimes referred to as the sociology of health, illness, and healing. The Sociology Department offers a number of other advanced courses in medical sociology where many of the topics we will discuss are examined in more depth. R100, Introduction to Sociology is a prerequisite for this course. This course can be used to fulfill the general social science distribution area requirements or the elective requirements for the sociology major or minor as well as the sociology medical minor and medical humanities and health studies program.