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Results for “SOCIAL SCIENCES”

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PubMed2000

Social science. Stress: the invisible hand in Eastern Europe's death rates.

The end of communism opened up a life of economic uncertainty in the Eastern Bloc. And that, say some social scientists, may be exerting a deadly effect on residents, whose high expectations that their lives would improve were quickly dashed by the bumpy transition to a market economy. Disillusionment led to stress and depression, and depression was a harbinger of death.

Communism↗
PubMed2002

Complexity and practical knowledge in the social sciences: a comment on Stehr and Grundmann.

This paper takes issue with Stehr and Grundmann's argument in this journal that sociology's poor record of contribution to practical knowledge results from sociologists' misguided attachment to the idea that social phenomena are peculiarly complex, and so peculiarly resistant to efforts at practical knowledge formation. Stehr and Grundmann develop their thesis by contrasting sociology to economics, claiming the latter's superior methods and disciplinary cultures enable it to contribute more successfully to solving practical problems. We argue that Stehr and Grundmann's comparison of the relative success of economics and sociology as policy sciences underestimates the extent to which the complexity argument has been destructive of economics' capacity to contribute practical knowledge, and overestimates the importance of disciplinary methods and cultures in explaining the use of economics in policy making. Further, we argue that the 'complexity argument' can contribute to better policy making, by virtue of its capacity to highlight the dangers of simplistic or fundamentalist solutions to social problems with complex causes.

Economics↗
PubMed1992

Structuring HIV prevention service delivery systems on the basis of social science theory.

In order to identify the optimal configuration of HIV prevention programs, it is necessary to examine different theoretical models of behavior change. Cognitive/decision-making theories of human behavior change are compared to social learning theories vis-a-vis their influence on the structure of service delivery systems. Cognitive/decision-making theories ascribe behavior change to the provision of new information and favor the development of homogeneous interventions providing clients with information about risk behaviors. These interventions are easily standardized across delivery sites and various target populations. Social learning theories view behavior change as a series of stages and recognize the influence of sociocultural variables. They favor multiple heterogeneous interventions in a variety of settings, with the provision of skills training as well as information. Ongoing HIV prevention research indicates that social learning theories provide a more accurate paradigm of human behavior change for the complex behaviors related to HIV risk. Public health agencies must therefore continue to strengthen organizational and referral relationships with community-based organizations that can provide the specialized prevention interventions called for by social learning theory. This will require ongoing collaboration and technical assistance.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Widespread occurrence of the inverse square distribution in social sciences and taxonomy.

The widespread occurrence of an inverse square relation in the hierarchical distribution of subcommunities within communities (or subspecies within species) has been recently invoked as a signature of hierarchical self-organization within social and ecological systems. Here we show that, whether such systems are self-organized or not, this behavior is the consequence of the treelike classification method. Different treelike classifications (both of real and truly random systems) display a similar statistical behavior when considering the sizes of their sub-branches.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2001

[Heidelberg Centenarian Study: theoretical and methodological principles for social science research of the oldest old].

This paper addresses two important issues of oldest old research. First, we try to answer the question whether differences between extremely old persons are based on enduring aging processes of physical, social and psychological functions, or whether they are the result of selective survival weeding out the frail. Both trajectories predict low variability, but on different levels. Second, we investigate to which extent the variability of extremely old persons can be assessed by traditional psychosocial instruments. One hundred and fifty six centenarians were contacted, of whom 91 centenarians and 86 proxies participated in this study. The distribution of the cognitive status reveals a high amount of variability. In contrast, with respect to functional capacity 83% receive support from the German Statutory Insurance System for Long-Term Care. The higher variability in the psychological variable points to adaptive potential. We assume that in extreme old age various resources are used to maintain physical functioning above a critical threshold.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1994

Understanding the social patterning of health: the role of the social sciences.

Although it is well known that their sex and socio-economic position profoundly influence people's mental and physical health, their use of health care, and their likely length of life, much research uses sex and social class as control variables rather than enquiring into the reasons for their association with health. Recent work on socio-economic differentials in health shows that these exist in all societies and are apparent throughout the social scale, suggesting that there is not simply a threshold of absolute deprivation below which people are sicker, but a linear relationship between socioeconomic circumstances and health even among the better-off. Other recent work indicates that cultural, social and economic conditions in the past may help to explain current variations in health. The observation that there are variations over the life course in the social patterning of health raises a number of interesting questions about the mechanisms involved; all the likely explanations have a social component. There is currently an exciting agenda for studying questions about interactions between material, psychosocial and biological factors in the production of health. Answers to such questions are important for decisions about how, when, and on whom public health medicine should intervene to promote the public health and to reach the targets set in the recent White Papers.

Health Status↗