Showing papers in "Social Science & Medicine in 1992"

TL;DR: It is hypothesized that marriage may be beneficial to health because many spouses monitor and attempt to control their spouse's health behaviors, and there is some support for the social control and health behavior hypothesis among the married.

TL;DR: The intention of this broad overview is to bring some particularly useful concepts developed in cultural geography to the attention of social scientists interested in matters of health and to stimulate research along new lines.

TL;DR: The solution to the waste of resources inherent in non-compliance lies not in attempting to increase patient compliance per se, but in the development of more open, co-operative doctor-patient relationships.

TL;DR: It is argued for a new approach to transcend the disciplinary bounds inherent in multi- and interdisciplinary research, which can provide a systematic, comprehensive theoretical framework for the definition and analysis of the social, economic, political, environmental, and institutional factors influencing human health and well-being.

TL;DR: This paper attempts to meet part of the criticism on the concept of indirect costs, which are defined as the value of production lost to society due to disease, by proposing a new method, the friction cost method.

TL;DR: An in-depth, ethnographic investigation into the popular culture of prophylactic behaviour carried out in South Wales during 1988 and 1989 is based on the operation of cultural norms and practices related to the understanding of the cause and distribution of illness and death from heart ailments.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined psychosocial functioning in a group of people in whom epilepsy was well-controlled; the majority had been seizure-free for at least two years, and drew upon a model of quality of life which incorporated physical, social and psychological domains.

TL;DR: Quality weights for life years are empirically more meaningful, in the sense that they are more amenable to empirical testing, if they are interpreted simply as preference weights rather than measures of amounts of well life in the utilitarian tradition.

TL;DR: This paper examines how the genetic stories about mapping and its potential products being told in the biomedical (and popular) literature continue a tradition of reductionism and determinism and leads to restricted conceptions of health and illness.

TL;DR: This paper is based on baseline data from a survey of 1042 fifty-five year olds living in the Central Clydeside Conurbation, who constitute the eldest cohort of the 'West of Scotland Twenty-07 Study'--a longitudinal study of health and everyday life.

TL;DR: It is argued that AIDS prevention campaigns have not yet taken into account the cultural, social, and economic constraints on most African women's ability to comply with advice to limit partners and use condoms.

TL;DR: It is indicated that loneliness may be significant at all stages in the course of alcoholism: as a contributing and maintaining factor in the growth of abuse and as an encumbrance in attempts to give it up.

TL;DR: A review is presented of literature on the Sickness Impact Profile, which appears to be a reliable instrument with sufficient content validity and shows good correlations with other health status and functional status measures.

TL;DR: It is maintained in this paper that the successful assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of the race concept, but rather a prediction that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular socially constructed 'racial' category.

TL;DR: Determinants of vigorous physical activity in a community sample of adults over a 24-month period provides strong support for bidirectional causation between behavior and determinants and suggest hypotheses to be tested in experimental studies.

TL;DR: The development of a new questionnaire to measure social support, the Close Persons Questionnaire is described from the Whitehall II Study, a longitudinal study of the impact of psychosocial factors on health.

TL;DR: Non-urgent use of the ER is linked to need factors arising from socioeconomic stress, psychiatric co-morbidities, and a lack of social support, and the need to re-structure health care delivery systems to provide greater access to primary care and provide more attention to psychosocial aspects of patient care in clinical settings is discussed.

TL;DR: While all three types of support (emotional, instrumental and informational) were shown to be significantly related to recovery of functional capacity, substantial differences were found in the nature of those effects.

TL;DR: Findings suggest that minority women often retain substantial power vis a vis their male partners with respect to sexual decision-making among groups of high risk black and hispanic women.

TL;DR: It is suggested that, as are other forms of interpersonal communication, medical consultations are processes of personal and mutual influence that unfold according to the characteristics of the individuals and to interactive processes related to how interactants adapt their communication to one another.

TL;DR: Discriminant analysis demonstrated differences between completers and noncompleters on several health belief items, in particular those regarding health motivation, the perceived severity of the disease, costs and benefits of the treatment regimen and self-efficacy.

TL;DR: There are a number of factors leading to the routinization of hospice care including the ways in which it was sponsored and developed at the local level, and pressures toward bureaucratization and professionalization, according to Weber's concept of charisma.

TL;DR: Quality of life broadens the criteria by which cancer treatments are evaluated, to include the experience of the patient, to understand the impact of cancer upon the patient.

TL;DR: More programs are needed for women in general, including older women, men, traditional health practitioners and opinion leaders, incorporating sero-positive women wherever possible, and HIV/AIDS-related research regarding women must be increased as their access to adequate health services and income-earning opportunities.

TL;DR: A shift away from a theory-driven 'applied ethics' to a more situational, contextual approach to medical ethics opens the way for ethnographic studies of moral problems in health care as well as a conception of moral theory that is more responsive to the empirical dimensions of those problems.

TL;DR: The results of a study into community perceptions and practice relating to causation, treatment and prevention of malaria in a rural Adangbe farming community in Southern Ghana are presented.

TL;DR: Sequential regression analyses revealed that married men were significantly fatter and more likely to be obese than never married or previously married men, even when demographic, social, and physical variables were controlled.

TL;DR: It is clear now that a lower socio-economic status is associated with a higher frequency of a wide range of health problems, and a negative association has consistently been found for the following health indicators: birth weight, adult body height, and prevalence of health complaints.

TL;DR: It is argued that in the past decade or so, the simultaneous rapid growth of prostitution as a lucrative sex industry and of the Thai economy as an emerging newly industrialized country (NIC) have, paradoxically, enabled female prostitutes to conserve the basic institutions of society.