Social Factors in Community Life – Behavioral sciences explore the cognitive processes within organisms and the behavioral interactions between organisms in the natural world. It involves the systematic analysis and investigation of human and animal behavior through the study of the past, controlled and naturalistic observation of the present and disciplined scientific experimentation and modeling.
It attempts to accomplish legitimate, objective conclusions through rigorous formulations and observation. Generally, behavior science deals primarily with human action and often seeks to generalize about human behavior as it relates to society.
Social Factors in Community Life
Social factors are any variable which arises from culture, environment, community, family, organization, society, government, the state, the media, technology, religion, ideology, discourse, language, communication, and which influences the individual to think and act in a certain way.
Social Factors That Affect Health Outcomes
Upstream social factors-Laws, policies, and underlying values that shape the following:
- Income and wealth
- Education
- Employment
- Household composition
- Experiences based on race or ethnic group
- Social mobility
- Stressful experiences related to any of the above
- Income inequality
Midstream social factors-Factors that are strongly influenced by upstream factors and that are likely to affect health:
- Housing
- Transportation
- Other conditions in homes, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities, including conditions that produce stress and family disruption (e.g., parenting skills, parenting stress, leisure time, quality of schooling, physical and psychosocial working conditions)
Benefits of Social Factors in Community Life:
- Provide the individual needs security and protection.
- It strengthens the unity among people.
- Provides for cooperation among the members. It encourages collective forces (efforts) for fulfillment of community’s needs.
- Depends on communication system among the members.
- Provides the individual with opportunities for the expression of his talents, abilities and personality development.
- Provides sense of belongingness.
- Community life has its own conflicts and contradictions for the individuals. Certain times community life has tensions, clashes due to anti-social tendency of man.
It is better to know: Social factors affect diseases at three levels:
1. Physical level: The social class, environment, nutrition, housing, etc. are responsible for occurrence of disease.
2. Psycho-social level: Diseases occur due to prevalence of mental stress and strain resulting from specific environmental factors.
3. Cultural level: Social milieu, attitudes, beliefs psychosomatic factors, etc. affects the disease pattern and in implementation of preventive and therapeutic modalities.
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