Learn — Sociology: society, culture, groups & social processes

4 notes · 4 questions on the topic

Sociology — definition, scope, methods and importance in nursing

Sociology is the scientific study of society — of social relationships, institutions, groups and processes, and of the way they shape and are shaped by individual behaviour — named by Auguste Comte in 1838 from the Latin socius (companion) and the Greek logos (study). It sits in the nursing syllabus because health and illness are social as much as biological: poverty, caste, gender, family, occupation and belief decide who falls ill, who seeks care and who recovers, and a nurse who does not read the patient's social world treats half the patient.

Founders to name: Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, who coined the word and proposed the law of three stages (theological, metaphysical, positive); Herbert Spencer (society as an organism); Émile Durkheim (social facts, the study of suicide as a social phenomenon, the first sociology department); Max Weber (verstehen — understanding social action from within; bureaucracy); Karl Marx (class and conflict); and in India G.S. Ghurye, M.N. Srinivas (sanskritisation, dominant caste) and Radhakamal Mukerjee.
Scope: the formalistic or specialistic school (Simmel, von Wiese) holds that sociology studies only the forms of social relationships, while the synthetic school (Durkheim, Hobhouse, Sorokin) treats it as a general science of all social life; sociology is distinguished from anthropology (small, whole cultures), psychology (the individual), economics and political science (one institution each), history (the past) and social work (the practice of helping).
Methods: the social survey (questionnaire and interview over a sample — the NFHS is one), the case study (one family or community in depth), observation (participant, where the researcher lives in the community, and non-participant), the interview, the historical and comparative methods, and the statistical method; a good study is objective, systematic, sampled and ethical, and the nurse's community diagnosis is a sociological survey.
Basic concepts the paper asks: society, community, association and institution; culture, norms, values, folkways, mores and laws; status (ascribed and achieved) and role; social groups, primary and secondary; socialisation; social stratification and mobility; social control; social change; and social problems — each carried on the rows of this section.
Medical sociology and the sociology of health study the social causes of disease (the social determinants — income, education, housing, water, occupation, discrimination), the social patterning of health behaviour (who smokes, who breastfeeds, who immunises), the sick role and illness behaviour, the hospital as a social institution, the doctor-nurse-patient relationship and the social consequences of illness (stigma in leprosy, tuberculosis, HIV and mental illness).
Importance in nursing: understanding the patient's family, caste, class, religion and community as part of the assessment; planning care that fits the culture (food, modesty, gender of the carer, rituals at birth and death); working with the family as the unit of care and the community as the setting; recognising the social causes behind the medical diagnosis (the anaemic girl who eats last); using and shaping social legislation and welfare; and communicating across social distance without prejudice.
The nurse is herself a social actor with a status and a role, in a hospital that is a bureaucracy with its own norms, hierarchy and informal groups; sociology explains the ward's culture, the team's conflicts and the community's response to a health programme as clearly as it explains the patient.

Society, community, culture and socialisation

A society is the web of social relationships among people who share a territory, a culture and institutions (MacIver), a community is a group living in a definite area with a common way of life and a sense of belonging, and culture is the whole learnt way of life — knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and habit (Tylor) — that a society passes to its members. Socialisation is the lifelong process by which a newborn animal becomes a social person by learning that culture, and these four concepts are the foundation of the sociology paper and of culturally competent nursing.

Society is marked by likeness and difference, interdependence, cooperation and conflict, and it is abstract — a system of relationships, not a crowd; a community adds locality, a common life and we-feeling (a village, a tribe, a town), an association is an organised group formed for a purpose (a nurses' union, the Red Cross), and an institution is an established procedure for meeting a need (marriage, education, the hospital) — a community has associations and lives by institutions.
Culture is learnt, not inherited; shared; transmitted from generation to generation by language and symbols; cumulative; dynamic; integrated (its parts fit); and adaptive; material culture is the artefacts (tools, houses, medicines) and non-material culture the ideas (beliefs, values, norms), and Ogburn's cultural lag is the gap when material culture changes faster than the non-material (the ultrasound machine arrives before the attitude to the girl child changes).
The elements: norms (the rules of behaviour), values (what is held good), folkways (customary ways — eating with the right hand), mores (folkways with a moral force — respect for elders; a taboo is a negative more), customs and laws (norms enforced by the state); sanctions, positive and negative, keep them; ethnocentrism judges other cultures by one's own, cultural relativism understands each in its own terms, and a subculture is a group's culture within the larger one.
Culture changes by invention, discovery and diffusion (borrowing from other cultures), and contact produces acculturation (taking on another culture's traits) and assimilation (merging into it); civilisation is the utilitarian, measurable achievement of a culture (technology, cities), while culture in the narrow sense is its values and arts — civilisation can be borrowed, culture is lived.
Socialisation runs from the primary socialisation of the family in the first years, through the secondary socialisation of school, peers, religion, work and the media, to resocialisation in a new role (the student who becomes a nurse) or a total institution (the hospital, the prison, the army); Cooley's looking-glass self (we see ourselves as others see us), Mead's I and me and the generalised other, and Freud's superego are the theories asked.
Status is the position held (ascribed by birth — sex, caste, age; achieved by effort — nurse, mother, graduate) and role is the behaviour expected of it; role conflict arises when two roles clash (the nurse who is also a mother on night duty), role strain when one role's demands clash, and a patient admitted to hospital loses several roles at once and gains the sick role.
Culture and health: beliefs about the cause of disease (evil eye, hot and cold foods, sins of a past life), food taboos in pregnancy and lactation, practices at birth (prelacteal feeds, discarding colostrum, applying ash to the cord), attitudes to menstruation, the gender of the carer, the family's decision-maker, ritual at death, and stigma; the nurse assesses the culture without judging it, keeps what is harmless or helpful, and negotiates change only where a practice harms.

Social groups, social processes and social control

A social group is two or more people in sustained interaction who share a sense of belonging and common norms, and social processes are the recurring forms of interaction — cooperation, accommodation, assimilation, competition and conflict — through which groups form, work and change. Social control is the set of means by which a society regulates the behaviour of its members and keeps them to its norms, and social change is the alteration of those norms, institutions and relationships over time; the paper asks the classifications, and the ward, the team and the community show them daily.

Cooley divided groups into primary — small, face-to-face, intimate, lasting, an end in themselves, the nursery of human nature (the family, the play group, the neighbourhood, the close ward team) — and secondary, which are large, impersonal, formal, contractual and a means to an end (the hospital, the trade union, the state); Sumner's in-group (we) and out-group (they) and Hyman's reference group (the one whose standards a person adopts, whether or not he belongs — the student nurse and the staff nurses) complete the set.
Other classifications: formal (a defined structure and rules) and informal; voluntary and involuntary; open and closed; horizontal and vertical; and the transient collectivities — the crowd (physical presence, emotional contagion, suggestibility), the mob (an active, aggressive crowd), the audience and the public (dispersed, sharing an interest through the media) — each with its own psychology, which is why a crowd outside a casualty department needs handling that no individual in it would need.
Associative processes bring people together: cooperation (working together for a shared goal — direct or indirect, primary, secondary or tertiary), accommodation (adjusting to conflict without resolving it — by compromise, arbitration, conciliation, toleration, conversion or subordination), assimilation (the gradual merging of cultures or groups into one) and acculturation; dissociative processes separate: competition (impersonal striving for a scarce goal by the rules) and conflict (a personal, conscious struggle to defeat the other — the opposite of cooperation and the negative of competition).
Groups have structure — leaders, roles, norms, communication patterns, cohesiveness — and group dynamics explains conformity (Asch), obedience to authority (Milgram), social facilitation and social loafing, and groupthink; the hospital ward is a formal secondary group holding an informal primary group whose norms decide whether hand hygiene actually happens.
Social control (Ross) is informal — the folkways and mores, custom, religion, public opinion, praise and ridicule, gossip and ostracism, family and neighbourhood pressure — and formal — law, the police, the courts, education, the state's rewards and punishments; informal control is stronger in the village and the primary group, formal control in the city and the secondary group, and both are positive (reward) and negative (punishment).
Deviance is behaviour that breaks the norms and social control is the response; a health programme that changes a norm (every child immunised, no open defecation, no salt without iodine) is using public opinion and law as social control, and community mobilisation works by turning the new behaviour into a mores of the group.
Social change is the alteration of social structure and relationships over time, driven by technology, education, urbanisation and industrialisation, legislation, demographic shifts, ideas and leaders, and by planned change such as health programmes; it meets resistance from vested interests, habit, fear of the new and cultural lag, and a nurse who introduces a change plans for that resistance — with the opinion leaders first, the innovators next, and the late majority last.

Social stratification — caste, class and social mobility

Social stratification is the division of a society into layers ranked above and below one another in wealth, power and prestige (Sorokin), so that birth or achievement places a person in a stratum that shapes his opportunities, his health and his life expectancy. In India the closed system of caste and the open system of class coexist, and social mobility — movement between strata — is the measure of how open the society is; the paper asks the features of caste and class and the kinds of mobility, and the nurse meets stratification in every difference in who gets sick and who gets care.

Stratification rests on class (economic — Marx's ownership of the means of production, Weber's class, status and party), caste (birth and ritual rank), race, gender, age, estate (feudal Europe) and slavery; every society ranks, and the question is whether the rank is ascribed at birth or achieved.
The caste system's classical features: membership by birth and for life, hereditary occupation, endogamy (marriage within the caste), a hierarchy of ritual purity and pollution with restrictions on food and contact, and a governing caste council; the varna model has four orders (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra) with the former untouchables outside it, while the lived reality is thousands of jatis; untouchability is abolished by Article 17 of the Constitution and punished under the Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989.
Caste is changing rather than vanishing: Srinivas described sanskritisation (a lower caste adopting the customs of a higher one to rise) and the dominant caste, and industrialisation, urban anonymity, education, the constitutional reservation of seats and posts for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, legislation and inter-caste marriage have loosened the occupational and commensal rules while caste identity persists in marriage and politics.
Class is an open system based mainly on wealth, occupation and education — upper, middle and lower, with the middle class growing fastest in India — in which membership is achieved, marriage across classes is possible and mobility is expected; caste and class differ on birth versus achievement, endogamy, ritual rank, and the possibility of movement, and they overlap because the lowest castes are also, on average, the poorest.
Social mobility (Sorokin) is horizontal (a change of position at the same level — one job for another) or vertical (up or down), and intergenerational (the son of a labourer becomes a doctor) or intragenerational (within one life); its channels are education above all, then occupation, wealth, marriage, migration to the city, legislation and reservation, and political power.
Stratification is a health variable: infant and maternal mortality, undernutrition, anaemia, tuberculosis and untreated illness are highest in the Scheduled Castes and Tribes and the poorest wealth quintile in every national survey, access to institutional delivery and immunisation rises with class, and discrimination in a health facility — a separate queue, a refused touch — is itself a cause of late presentation.
The nurse's duty is equality in practice: the same touch, the same bed, the same explanation for every patient; the identification of the social factors behind a patient's disease without moralising about them; the use of the entitlements that exist (scholarships, reservation, the health card); and the refusal to reproduce the hierarchy within the ward's own staff.

Free today: the 10-question daily quiz · the NORCET 11 recall paper · what ₹999 unlocks — once, no auto-renewal.