M2: use the different sociological perspectives to discuss patterns and trends of health in two different social groups.
The following assignment will discuss the different sociological explanations in relation to the patterns and trends of health and illness in the different social groups. The association between class and health in the society presents a great dilemma for sociologists. The black report outlined four different explanations to explain this relationship: * The Artefact approach * Natural and Social approach * Cultural Explanation * Structural Explanation.
Social class
The first explanation, the artefact approach has the vision that both class and health are artefacts of the measurement process. The approach suggests that the inequalities that are present in health are not real inequalities, but instead are part of the measurement process. One must look at the processes that are involved in how these statistics are produced. A number of different factors have been identified as contributing factors to the relationship between class and health; these include the variations in diagnosis, certification, and classification and also the coding processes.
The Natural and Social explanation suggests that it is not the low social class which causes inequalities between health and class, but instead it believes that health status influences these social statuses. Natural is meant survival of the fittest, however, not the main feature of evolution. The main evolutionary feature is the continuation of what works well. Organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. Social selection is when, or the idea that an individual's health can influence their social mobility and, hence, their position in the social hierarchy, has been suggested as an important element in the process which produces social