Instructions For this assignment, you will reflect before and after completing y

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Instructions
For this assignment, you will reflect before and after completing your readings for the module. In your reflection, address the following components:
Pre-flections: What do you already know about the topic before reading the textbook and reviewing the PowerPoint?
Reflections: What was your biggest takeaway?
Muddiest Point: What questions do you still have after going through the instructional materials (readings, PPTs, videos in vantage, knowledge checks, etc.).
Submission Instructions
TEXTBOOK:
1 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY: EXPLAINING AND THEORISING
MAIN POINTS
Sociology is a scientific approach to understanding people in society.
Social structures can often exert more influence over our behaviour than we would expect.
Sociological perspectives on health emphasise that it is vital to understand the social in order to fully understand health and illness.
The sociological imagination invites us to think beyond our own subjective perceptions.
Sociological theories are useful in moving away from common-sense understandings of society.
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this chapter is to introduce the discipline of sociology and to focus on the significance of the sociological study of health, illness and medicine. In order to do so it is necessary to begin by establishing the scope and remit of sociology as a subject area and as an explanatory method.
Sociology is concerned with the study of society, and specifically with key issues such as explaining change and the distribution of power between different social groups. The discipline of sociology also offers its students specific methods of investigation and explanation. For example, this chapter introduces you to the concept of the sociological imagination, asking you to adopt a critical and questioning approach to even the most mundane aspects of social life. Sociological knowledge is based on a ‘scientific’ approach built upon evidence to support theoretical perspectives. This chapter offers an introduction to a range of sociological perspectives.
SOCIOLOGY: A METHOD OF ENQUIRY AND EXPLANATION
The raw material of sociology is human society, the development of groups and the ways in which social groups are organised and change over time. Sociology is, therefore, the study of society. Such a statement tells us very little about sociology and does nothing to draw out what is distinctive about the discipline in relation to other social sciences such as psychology or simply to our own observations of society and social groups. Sociology is concerned with the study of human society (Giddens and Sutton, 2013: 4) in terms of the interaction between individuals and groups and the interaction between groups. It is not individuals per se who draw our attention, but how they interact with the social environment. Giddens and Sutton (2013: 7) use the term ‘society’ to refer to the ‘common cultural features such as language, values and basic norms’ of particular countries, but also the ‘enduring patterns formed by relationships among people, groups and institutions’. Sociologists refer to society as a ‘system’ and our own behaviour as ‘institutionalised’ to draw attention to what is external to the individual that is ‘society’ itself. ‘Society’ refers to the structural factors that influence our beliefs and behaviour and that establish some predictability and regularity in our lives.
What troubles many new students of sociology is the suggestion that something referred to as ‘society’ shapes or determines our behaviour. Such an explanation seems to take away what is individual about us and suggests that our behaviour and our beliefs are not unique but may be determined by an external force and replicated by many other individuals. On reflection, however, this process of shaping and influencing is evident in all that we do. Socialisation into the norms and values of a particular society enables us to predict and make sense of the behaviour of others and ourselves. ‘Society’ provides us with the cultural resources to live in the social world because patterns of behaviour, responses and ways of behaving are not invented anew each day but exist outside any one individual. In most human encounters within a specific society, there are roles to be played out, responses to be predicted and cues to be acted
It is not the imposition of new ways of doing what was once familiar that is interesting here. It is what went before. We would have engaged in most of the above activities without thinking about them. They would just seem normal. But where did they come from? So, for example, standing in a queue is an action that is very much influenced by particular societies. In some societies, such as British society, queuing carries very strong informal norms of behaviour. We do not skip ahead and doing so is met with sanction and disapproval. In other European societies, such as Germany, the informal norms around queueing are more relaxed and the dismay that British people may express at someone jumping ahead is not there. The point here is that how we act is not our own personal invention; it emerges out of the society in which we live, in ways of acting, behaving and thinking that are shaped by a number of subtle, direct and indirect processes over our whole lifecourse.
Link
Chapter 5 provides an example of the complex relationship between structural factors and personal choice in relation to health inequalities.
The relationship between society and individuals
Thus far this discussion has been concerned with demonstrating what sociology ‘is’ by examining the subject matter or what has been referred to as the ‘raw material’ of study, namely society. However, the discussion has developed further in terms of suggesting a specific and distinct relationship between individuals and the society or structure in which they live. A helpful example of the way in which structure (society) influences the actions and experiences of individuals is provided by Giddens. He uses the analogy of language to illustrate the relationship that individuals have with the wider social structure. None of us has invented the language that we use, but without it social activity would be impossible because it is our shared meanings that sustain ‘society’. As Giddens and Sutton (2013) also point out, each of us is capable of using that language in a creative, distinct and individual way, and yet no one person creates language. In the same way, human behaviour is not determined in a mechanical way by the structure we call society. Later chapters discuss the significance of social class in determining levels of morbidity and mortality and yet not every person in each social class category will have identical experiences. There will be enough similarities in patterns of health within each social class for us to justifiably place people in these specific groupings. Similarities in people’s experiences can be seen in terms of income levels, of availability of local resources such as GPs, of geographical location and of their physical environment and patterns of expenditure. The relationship and interplay between society and the individual is explained in terms of structure and agency. The latter is a concept used to refer to a cluster of ideas about the potential for individuals to determine their lives, to change their environment and, ultimately, to influence the wider structure. The concept of agency, therefore, allows us to appreciate the way in which we are shaped by society, and in turn shape society.
If the subject matter of sociology is human society, and behaviour is explained primarily in terms of ‘structure’, then this logically denotes specific factors in the explanatory framework of the discipline. Sociological explanations of what determines our state of health will necessarily differ from, for example, biological explanations. Clearly, disease is a biological and physical entity experienced through the medium of the body. The causes of disease, while in part biological, can also be considered in terms of social and structural factors. The immediate cause of a disease may be infection but the factors that lead to this may be many and varied. If we reflect upon patterns of morbidity and mortality over the last two centuries, then it is possible to observe a significant shift away from infectious diseases to chronic conditions. In other words, when we consider the factors that influence a person’s state of health, the risk of infection, an ability to fight infection and genetic predisposition are greatly important but, within sociology, these are not our main focus. Social and environmental factors such as age, social class and gender are as, if not more, important.
The Covid-19 pandemic that began in 2019 provides an instructive case study of the role of society and how our actions, thoughts and emotions are to some – if not a large – degree influenced and shaped by the society in which we live. The pandemic was highly disruptive of everyday life. All the various routines and patterns of life with which we were familiar were suddenly turned upside down. Activities such as shopping, going to work, standing in queues, attending social events and physical proximity to other people were suddenly changed beyond recognition. Either they were closed down, as was the case with sporting and social events, or new rules came into play concerning social distancing.

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