Micro And Macro-Sociological Analysis

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Although the term "sociology" was first used by the French social philosopher August Comte (1798-1857), the discipline was firmly established by distinguished theorists such as Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Max Weber (1864-1920) (Nobbs et al, 1978). Sociology is the study of human social life; it is a branch of social sciences which studies social relations, social interaction, social stratification, social organization, culture, deviant behavior and social control using both qualitative and quantitative research techniques (Tischler, 2007).
There are two branches of sociology: Macro and micro sociology (Henslin and Nelson, 1995; Tischler, 2007). Macro-sociology focuses on the broad features of society. The goal of macro-sociology is to study the large-scale phenomenon that determines how social groups are organized and positioned within the social structure. The micro-sociology, however, focuses on social interaction. It analyzes what people do and how they behave and interact.
B: Health and illness in social science:
Early sociologists did not discuss health and illness directly. It was not until the 1950s that the value of sociological analysis in this field achieved recognition and even then it did not become established as a sub-discipline until the 1960s …show more content…

For the medical profession, disease is a biological condition, universal and unchanging; social constructionists, however, define illness as the social meaning of that condition (Berger and Luckman 1966). It emphasizes how the meaning and experience of illness is shaped by cultural and social systems. This field of medical sociology is organized in to three themes (Conrad and Barker, 2010): the cultural meaning of illness, the illness experience as socially constructed, and medical knowledge as socially constructed. In this section these three aspects are discussed in

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