Sociality, Hierarchy, Health: Comparative Biodemography is a collection of papers that examine cross-species comparisons of social environments with a focus on social behaviors along with social hierarchies and connections, to examine their effects on health, longevity, and life histories. This report covers a broad spectrum of nonhuman animals, exploring a variety of measures of position in social hierarchies and social networks, drawing links among these factors to health outcomes and trajectories, and comparing them to those in humans. Sociality, Hierarchy, Health revisits both the theoretical underpinnings of biodemography and the empirical findings that have emerged over the past two decades.
Sociologists and anthropologists have had a long interest in studying the ways in which cultures shaped different patterns of health, disease, and mortality. Social scientists have documented low rates of chronic disease and disability in non-Western societies and have suggested that social stability, cultural homogeneity and social cohesion may play a part in explaining these low rates. On the other hand, in studies of Western societies, social scientists have found that disease and mortality assume different patterns among various ethnic, cultural and social-economic groups. The role of stress, social change and a low degree of cohesion have been suggested, along with other factors as contributing to the variable rates among different social groups. Social cohesion has been implicated in the cause and recovery from both physical and psychological illnesses. Although there has been a large amount of work established the beneficial effects of cohesion on health and well-being, relatively little work has focused on HOW increased social cohesion sustains or improves health. This work is based on the premise that there are risk factors, including social cohesion that regulate health and disease in groups. One of the challenges is how to measure social cohesion – it can be readily observed and experienced but difficult to quantify. A better understanding of how social cohesion works will be valuable to improving group-level interventions.
Social status, one's relative rank in a social hierarchy, is a ubiquitous part of human social life. A large focus of the literature has been on subjective social status (SSS), more specifically, which is one's psychological perception of his position within the social hierarchy. It is also one factor that accounts for variation in health. While there is abundant evidence for an association between SSS and health, there are several important gaps in this literature. First, the antecedents of SSS remain largely unknown. What developmental and contextual factors (Chapter II) and observable cues (Chapter III) predict whether an individual will experience high or low SSS? Second, there is limited research regarding how social hierarchies unfold over time in a population of young adults. How does SSS in young adults change in a new social group and affect physical and mental health (Chapter IV)? Beyond needing to clarify the antecedents and stability of SSS, the molecular mechanisms explaining the relationship between SSS and health remain unclear (Chapter V). Chapters II, III, and IV tested aims in a sample of 94 undergraduate college freshmen living in residence halls. Results of Chapter II indicated that how individuals appraised potentially negative social situations predicted SSS, whereas early life stress did not. Chapter III results suggested that other-rated attractiveness, and dominance to a lesser extent, positively predicted SSS rated by an individual and by outside observers. Together, Chapters II and III highlight contextual and observable cues that predict SSS. The findings of Chapter IV identified that SSS was stable or increased for the majority of freshmen throughout the academic year, but SSS did not reliably predict physical or mental self-rated health; this is perhaps due to the nature of the social group targeted. Chapter V, a study conducted in a population of 47 young, healthy women, revealed that lower SSS individuals have heightened pro-inflammatory gene expression. Thus, those lower in SSS likely perceive diminishing social resources and a threatening social world, which manifests as heightened inflammatory processes, and has potential downstream consequences for inflammatory-related illness.
This book is intended as a core textbook for courses in public health that examines current issues in health from a social and behavioral science perspective. It is a cross-disciplinary course (public health, medical sociology, health psychology, medical anthropology) and thus there are many ways to teach the course based on a particular instructor's perspective. The authors wrote the book because they were dissatisfied with the way other texts apply social science to public health and found that many texts being used were from related fields such as medicine, nursing or general health.The authors are planning to do a major revision based on reviews they have collected and the reviews we have collected. We believe the revised edition will essentially be a new text based on rich feedback. They will include new theory, new cases, new research, and a rich ancillary package. They will also reduce the frameworks presented to make the book more readable to students.
`The effects of social context and social structure on health are well documented. The concept of social capital provides a slightly different take on the issue, as it attempts to discover the features of populations in different areas that are crucial in determining the extent and the quality of social interactions and the social institutions within society. Such factors as social networks, levels of participation in civil life (as a citizen) and levels of trust within communities are all associated with social capital. This book provides a detailed exploration of the concept, on its effects on psychological functioning and on the risk factors for mental health that are associated with communities that have either high or low levels of social capital.' - Community Care Why do some areas have a higher prevalence of mental illness than others? How does the structure of a society affect its inhabitants' mental health? This remarkable book is the first to explore in detail the concept of social capital and its implications for mental health policy. Drawing on evidence from international research and fieldwork, the contributors examine the risk factors for mental health associated with both low and high social capital communities. They discuss the importance of relationships between individuals, groups and abstract bodies such as the state and outline different systems of social capital, for example intra-group `bonding' and inter-group `bridging'. The authors challenge the notion of community as a strictly area-based concept and call for broader-based studies of communities built around race, faith or even around a common social exclusion. Social Capital and Mental Health also reviews methods of measuring social capital, analyses the implications of research findings for future policy developments and makes clear recommendations for future practice and research. This book will be an informative and engaging read for sociologists and psychiatrists, and an incisive resource for policy makers and practitioners.
Modern societies and organizations are characterized by multiple kinds of observations, systems, or rationalities, rather than singular identities and clear hierarchies. This holds true for healthcare where we find a range of different perspectives – from medicine to education, from science to law, from religion to politics – brought together in different types of arrangements. This innovative volume explores how this polycontexturality plays out in the healthcare arena. Drawing on systems theory, and Luhmann’s theory of social systems as communicative systems in particular, the contributors investigate how things – drugs, for example – and bodies are observed and constructed in different ways under polycontextural conditions. They explore how the different types of communication and observation are brought into workable arrangements – without becoming identical or reconciled – and discuss how health care organizations observe their own polycontexturality. Providing an analysis of healthcare structures that is up to speed with the complexity of healthcare today, this book shows how society and its organizations simultaneously manage contexts that do not fit together. It is an important work for those with an interest in health and illness, social theory, Niklas Luhmann, organizations and systems theory from a range of backgrounds including sociology, health studies, political science and management.
'Punchily written ... He leaves the reader with a sense of the gross injustice of a world where health outcomes are so unevenly distributed' Times Literary Supplement 'Splendid and necessary' Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm, New Statesman There are dramatic differences in health between countries and within countries. But this is not a simple matter of rich and poor. A poor man in Glasgow is rich compared to the average Indian, but the Glaswegian's life expectancy is 8 years shorter. The Indian is dying of infectious disease linked to his poverty; the Glaswegian of violent death, suicide, heart disease linked to a rich country's version of disadvantage. In all countries, people at relative social disadvantage suffer health disadvantage, dramatically so. Within countries, the higher the social status of individuals the better is their health. These health inequalities defy usual explanations. Conventional approaches to improving health have emphasised access to technical solutions – improved medical care, sanitation, and control of disease vectors; or behaviours – smoking, drinking – obesity, linked to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. These approaches only go so far. Creating the conditions for people to lead flourishing lives, and thus empowering individuals and communities, is key to reduction of health inequalities. In addition to the scale of material success, your position in the social hierarchy also directly affects your health, the higher you are on the social scale, the longer you will live and the better your health will be. As people change rank, so their health risk changes. What makes these health inequalities unjust is that evidence from round the world shows we know what to do to make them smaller. This new evidence is compelling. It has the potential to change radically the way we think about health, and indeed society.
We have remarkably good health in the rich countries of the world. Yet still our position in the social hierarchy is intimately related to our chances of getting ill and to how long we live.
There is a well-established inverse graded relationship between social class and infant, child, and adult health but this gradient is inconsistent and understudied among adolescents. The empirical inquiry into health inequalities among adolescents is of particular significance because health in adulthood is strongly influenced by early life circumstances. Current research suggests that social stratification, as reflected by adolescent perceived class identity, may be an important determinant of adolescent health independent of traditional objective social class indicators. This dissertation research was conducted using data Mexican adolescents living in poverty with the following objectives: 1) to examine the associations between adolescent risk behaviors and adolescent perceived class identity, using two subjective social status (SSS) scales and introducing a new indicator: "anticipated social mobility"; 2) to examine whether or not these associations persist after controlling for traditional indicators of socioeconomic position; and 3) to investigate demographic, psychosocial and socioeconomic correlates of adolescent class identity within a new national context and among a socioeconomically homogenous cohort. Adolescents were from households that qualified for the Mexican government's poverty alleviation program, "Oportunidades". Individual, household and neighborhood data were collected on urban households in seven states in Mexico in 2004 as part of the evaluation of this welfare program. The adolescent module was completed by approximately 7900 adolescents aged twelve to twenty-two. This dissertation highlights the known and unknown dimensions of adolescent class identity and health, filling in gaps in the scientific understanding of the social gradient in health during adolescence. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the dissertation. Chapter 2 reports on the shape of social class gradients for substance use among Mexican adolescents. Multiple logistic regressions are used to estimate the associations of objective indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) and SSS--at both community and societal levels-with smoking, alcohol and drug use. Chapter 3 examines multiple dimensions of social position in relation to obesity-related behaviors. Multiple objective and subjective measures of social position are used including parental education, household expenditures, community and society SSS, and school dropout status. Ordinal logistic regressions are used to estimate the associations between parental, household and adolescent indicators of social position and obesity risk. The first objective of Chapter 4 is to examine the association between adolescent risk behaviors and a new indicator of adolescent relative social position, adolescent anticipated social mobility. Anticipated social mobility was calculated for each subject by taking the difference between their rankings on two 10-rung ladder scales that measured (1) projected future social status and (2) current SSS within Mexican society. This chapter then investigates potential underlying demographic, socioeconomic and psychosocial determinants of this indicator. Multiple logistic regression analyzes are used to estimate the strength of associations in this chapter. Chapter 5 provides a summary of the findings from Chapters 2, 3 and 4. In addition, suggested future research directions and policy implications are discussed. This dissertation has contributed to the literature on health inequities by providing data on cross-sectional associations between objective and subjective indicators of social class and multiple risk behaviors in a vulnerable urban adolescent population. Findings provide evidence that there is a social gradient in health during adolescence. Adolescents who have dropped out of school and perceive themselves as having little control over their destinies are more likely to perceive themselves as having low social status and being downwardly mobile. Subjective measures of adolescent class identity, including subjective social status and anticipated social mobility, may be more effective than conventional indicators of social class in explaining the association between social position and health during this transitional period. The conclusion from this work suggests the usefulness of subjective indicators of adolescent class identity for further studies of adolescent populations, particularly those with a restricted range of socioeconomic statuses.
