Social Factors

A Social Factor is something that affects your attitudes and behaviors. These things can be the environment, neighborhood, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, stress and social relationships. These things are different than psychological, genetic or biological factors because these are the things around you, not inside you. These are the factors in the world around you that make you think the way you do and do the things you do. Social Factors are also broken up into two categories. These are Social institutions and Social location. A Social institution is something that every community has such as schools, medical building, police, government, churches, marriage and media. A Social location would be something personally that I share with someone else, such as, my age, race, marital status, education, major, hair color, eye color, religion and hobbies.

A Social location can affect your health more extremely than you thought. Race, age and marital status have an effect on your health and well being. Being married usually makes you healthier than the general population because you are more likely to eat healthy and be more active because another person depends on you. The reason why Race affects your health is because some diseases are more prominent in blacks as opposed to whites. This could lead to you having more or less medical problems or psychological problems. Age has an effect on your health because it is known that the older you are the more likely you are to get diseases and cancers. 

  The place you live whether it is rural or urban can also depend on your health. This is because you either have more or less access to necessary things to survive adequately. Living in a wealthy urban area will also increase your likelihood of good health because you have a cleaner environment and better health care access. "There are not enough doctors in rural areas to effectively treat these sparse populations. In Minnesota, there are five counties without a single primary care provider. That means rural people have to travel farther for treatment, especially when it comes to specialty treatment” (Peters and Vogel, 2011). When people live in poor rural areas it is more likely that diseases will spread and that you will have more stress which increases your risk of bad health.

Why do we have Medical Sociology, because it helps us see people as whole and to see why people’s health is the way it is. Medical Sociology helps us to figure out why people in a certain area have a certain disease or chronic illness. It also helps us to stop the disease and chronic illness from happening elsewhere. This field will help us to prevent things in the future.

References:
Cockerham, William C. 2012. Medical Sociology, 12th Ed. Boston: Prentice Hall.
Peters, David, and Jennifer Vogel. "Rural Health Care in Minnesota: A Primer." MPR News. N.p., June-July 2011. Web. 23 Apr. 2013. (Got picture from here also)