Health and Social Context

Catalog description

This course considers how the social world “gets under the skin” to affect individuals’ health. We’ll focus on key social contexts of everyday life – including the neighborhoods where people live and the social relationships in which they are embedded – and their direct and indirect implications for health outcomes. There are two main components of this course. First, we’ll read and discuss recent sociological research on social context, health, and health-related behaviors, paying attention to the strengths and weaknesses of various methodological approaches and identifying gaps in current knowledge. Second, students will develop their own research questions about the relationship between social context and health, and we will use population-based social survey data to explore these. Class instruction will include research question development, basic statistical analysis of survey data, workshopping early results, and social scientific writing. Short research reports written during the semester will provide a foundation from which students will write a final paper that examines how health is a product of social context.