bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Medical Education, Cultural Competence in
Authors: Stevens Fred , Goulbourne Jacqueline Simmonds 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
Cultural competence is often described as the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to better understand and to serve others with different systems of complex symbols and belief. Different researchers view cultural competence through different lenses, though there is a striking commonality in viewing competency as skills and knowledge in terms of an ability to manage others who deviate from the dominant culture. Moving cultural competence in medical education from a focus on learning about the specifics of others toward ongoing cultural learning and the development of critical consciousness and cultural humility requires a generic approach that makes students aware of their assumptions, biases, norms, and values. It implies creating a critical awareness of what a physician's social role and responsibilities involve. Cultural competence begins when we become aware that it is not only about otherness but also about self and the familiar. An individual or agency cannot be culturally competent, but must continually value and work toward culturally competent practices.
Stressful Life Events
Authors: Irby‐Shasanmi Amy , Redmond Deidre Lynn 
Published: February 2014

AbstractSociologists study the effect stress has on well‐being. They examine the aspects of the social environment and life circumstances that can be detrimental to the health of individuals. Collectively, these aspects of one's life are called stressors. There are several different types of stressors: life events, chronic strains, daily hassles, traumas, and non‐events, which each effect mental and physical health to different degrees and in varying ways. Sociologists often use the stress process model, a theoretical framework, for analyzing the social origins of health. The contribution of contemporary and future research on stressors and health will document and analyze stressful events that occur across the life course.
Health Care Delivery System: France
Authors: Schweyer François‐Xavier 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
The French health system is considered good in terms of both general health indicators and how it operates. However, the high level of health expenditure is becoming an acute problem. Regulation of providers (hospitals and health professionals) remains incomplete, and there are significant health inequalities. Structural reforms in organization and financing are underway, aimed at improving governance and regulation of the system.
Medical Education and Faculty Development
Authors: Steinert Yvonne 
Published: February 2014

AbstractFaculty development refers to that broad range of activities institutions use to renew or assist faculty in their multiple roles as well as those activities individuals engage in independently to enhance their abilities as teachers and educators, researchers and scholars, and leaders and administrators. In response to multiple factors, faculty development has become an increasingly important component of medical education. The majority of faculty development programs focus on teaching improvement. However, faculty development can play a significant role in helping health care professionals become more effective researchers and leaders; it can also focus on academic career development and organizational change. Health care professionals develop their knowledge, skills, and abilities in a number of ways, including both formal and informal approaches. Formal faculty development initiatives include workshops and seminars, short courses, fellowships, and other longitudinal programs. Informal approaches include work‐based learning and belonging to a community of practice. Mentorship is also key in promoting professional development. Faculty development activities have been highly valued by health care professionals, many of whom report an impact on their knowledge, skills, and behaviors as a faculty member. Academic vitality is dependent upon faculty members’ interest and expertise; faculty development plays a critical role in promoting academic excellence and vitality.
Weber, Max
Authors: Cockerham William C. 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
Max Weber is one of the foremost sociologists of all time who made numerous contributions to sociology and helped to establish the discipline as a distinct field of study. Although he was not a medical sociologist or an analyst of health‐related topics, his many insights into modern social conditions have influenced the work of scholars interested in health and illness. Weber's concepts of (1) socioeconomic status, (2) lifestyles, and (3) rationality and bureaucracy underlie many studies in medical sociology today on social class and health, health lifestyles, and hospitals.
Methodology
Authors: Tjørnhøj‐Thomsen Tine 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
Methodology pertains to another level of abstraction or research activity than method. The term “methodology” is used in various ways, often interchangeably with the term “method.” Method can be defined as a particular systematic way of conducting an inquiry, investigation, or analysis, in terms of procedural rules or particular techniques. In‐depth interviews, observations, as well as surveys and questionnaires are examples of data collection methods or data generation methods, while, for instance, statistical analysis or narrative analysis are methods of data analysis or data interpretation. Sometimes methodology is used for a body of methods employed within a particular academic field. The particular methods are linked to and informed by specific approaches, research traditions, or theories. In regard to qualitative research methods these are often presented in the literature as ethnography, phenomenology, case studies, narrative analysis, or grounded theory. Quantitative methods are associated with, for instance, statistical analysis, multilevel analysis, and regression analysis. But the reasoning and rationale for how these approaches link to the actual research methods belong to methodology.
Stress Process, The
Authors: Aneshensel Carol S. , Mitchell Uchechi A. 
Published: February 2014

AbstractThe stress process model is the predominant theoretical model for understanding the role of social stress in generating mental health disparities. Its components include: (1) stressors, which are external conditions that pose a threat or that obstruct attaining goals; (2) stress, the internal physiological arousal that results from exposure to a stressor; (3) distress, which is the emotional response that may result in mental and emotional disorder; and, (4) social and personal resources that counterbalance exposure to stressors. Key processes are the mediating and moderating role of resources with regard to the impact of stress on mental health.
Gender, Health, and Constrained Choice
Authors: Bird Chloe E. , Lang Martha E. 
Published: February 2014

AbstractIn this entry, we review and discuss gender differences in health and mortality and how they vary over time and cross‐nationally. We then summarize our integrative framework of constrained choice. This framework demonstrates how decisions made and actions taken at the levels of family, work, community, and government shape men's and women's opportunities to pursue health and, in so doing, contribute to observed disparities. Constrained choice provides a holistic, systematic approach to understanding this paradox and demonstrates that a multidisciplinary approach is essential to understanding gendered health inequalities. Constrained choice is intended to inform health conscious decision‐making and policy creation at the national, state/province, or local levels of government as well as employment settings, and to help families and individuals to develop health consciousness in making everyday life decisions.
Social Integration, Social Relationships, and Stress
Authors: Chahal Jasleen K. , Ewen Heidi 
Published: February 2014

AbstractSocial relationships allow individuals to share common experiences, as well as providing a sense of meaning in life. Social relationships offer a feeling of belonging and safety, yet they can also be a source of conflict and stress as individuals age. Integration and affiliation with particular social groups are essential for physical and psychosocial well‐being at all ages. Changes in the amount and types of stress associated with social integration and social relationships result from environmental factors, such as neighborhood context, that impact the availability of coping resources and challenge the further development of successful coping abilities essential to well‐being. The life course perspective provides a framework by which scholars study individuals, social paths, and environments in order to gain insight into stress, coping mechanisms, and the complexities of social integration through social relationships.
Medical Education and the Hidden Curriculum
Authors: Michalec Barret , Hafferty Frederic W. 
Published: February 2014

AbstractThis chapter provides a broad overview of aspects of hidden curriculum (HC) theory and their implications for medical education. We begin by differentiating between the three primary types of curricula (formal, informal, and hidden) and examine their relative impact on the socialization processes of medical trainees. We then link the rise of a HC literature within medical education to prior work in sociology and education scholarship and spotlight how this more invisible curriculum reflects and perpetuates power relations and hierarchies within health care. We conclude by considering potential implications of HC theory for contemporary initiatives such as interprofessional education, and discuss resilient features of the HC as well as strategies and mechanisms that may assuage its impact on the culture of medical education and medical students’ attitudes and behaviors.
Health Care Delivery System: Germany
Authors: Brockmann Hilke , Schulz Maike 
Published: February 2014

AbstractGermany has created and maintained the world's oldest universal health insurance system based on solidarity and pay‐as‐you‐go principles. Since 1883, mandatory health insurance has been steadily extended to new population groups. Benefits have increased and become more comprehensive. Since 1970, nearly 90 percent of the total population have been members of a statutory sickness fund; the remainder are privately insured. In 1995, Germany was the first country in the world to implement statutory long‐term care insurance. Today, despite cost containment policies, the total expenditure on health care, mainly financed through the contributions of employers and employees, is 11.6 percent of GDP. The hospital sector, a high number of physicians per capita, and high utilization rates are the main cost drivers. Nevertheless, the German health care system appears quite robust. Empirical findings reveal that medical progress and demographic aging will not necessarily increase health care expenditures.
Screening for Disease: Challenges
Authors: Armstrong Natalie 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
Screening for medical conditions is an important and topical issue. Medical screening, a key strategy of preventive medicine, raises fundamental issues because screening is a social intervention as well as a medical one, and can raise important social dilemmas. By screening here is meant population‐based medical screening: that offered to all people within an identified target population, for example based on age or sex.
Life Course
Authors: Brown Ryan 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
Life course approaches to health and illness over the lifespan have been informed by life course epidemiology, developmental psychology, lifespan sociology, life history theory, among other fields. A life course approach emphasizes the early origins of disease, with evidence mounting for developmental influences that cross multiple generations. It also emphasizes the dynamic, highly unpredictable nature of life course development, which offers constantly changing possibilities for resilience and healing as well as vulnerability and illness. Life history theory offers a theoretical framework for life course approaches to health and illness, binding evolutionary theory with neuroendocrine mechanisms that translate environmental influence into individual biological systems. Cultural systems scaffold human development, providing both pathogenic (illness‐generating) as well as protective (opportunities for healing and resilience) life course possibilities. Current principles in life course approaches to health and illness emphasize both the plasticity of development and the unpredictability of developmental trajectories.
Rural Health Geography
Authors: Munoz Sarah‐Anne 
Published: February 2014

Abstract“Rural health geography” refers to the study of geographical variations in aspects of health and health services provision within rural areas and between rural and urban areas. Geographers have used quantitative, statistical techniques to look at geographies of disease incidence and health service access. Qualitative methods and theoretical approaches linked to health geography have also been used to understand the lived experience of rural ill‐health.
Foucault, Michel
Authors: Milner Adrienne N. 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
Michel Foucault (1926–84), French social theorist, philosopher, and historian, was a leading figure in poststructuralist thought. He has made important contributions to the field of sociology in general and has also had a significant impact on the subdiscipline of medical sociology in particular. His philosophies of the body, of power and knowledge, and of sexuality continue to inform the field of medical sociology.
Socioeconomic Status, Definition
Authors: Baker Elizabeth H. 
Published: February 2014

AbstractSocioeconomic status (SES) is defined as a measure of one's combined economic and social status and tends to be positively associated with better health. This entry focuses on the three common measures of socioeconomic status; education, income, and occupation. I include definitions, theoretical background, and empirical support for each of these SES indicators and their relationship with health. SES is generally thought to influence health through three avenues: (1) SES influences health through the ability to purchase health promoting resources and treatments; (2) socialization of early health habits and continuing socialization of health habits differs by SES; and (3) it has been posited that, rather than SES influencing health, health influences SES – less healthy individuals complete fewer years of school, miss more work, and earn lower incomes.
Mental Health and Psychiatric Medicine
Authors: Kohrt Brandon A. , Kaiser Bonnie N. 
Published: February 2014

AbstractAnthropologists and cross‐cultural psychiatrists have examined mental health in cross‐cultural contexts by documenting not only symptoms and treatment, but also idioms of distress, culture‐bound syndromes, and meanings attributed to brain and mind dysfunction. Anthropologists have explored the intersection of social suffering and individual mental illness. Others in the field have critiqued how behavior becomes labeled and often stigmatized as mental illness in psychiatric practice in Western, high‐income countries. Cross‐cultural psychiatrists typically have incorporated this information into developing community and clinic‐based treatment approaches for refugees and immigrants. Increasingly, anthropologists and cross‐cultural psychiatrists have examined how psychiatry is applied in low‐ and middle‐income countries in the movement for global mental health.
Teamwork
Authors: Finn Rachael 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
Health care policy across the developed world has increasingly emphasized the need for teamwork for successful organizational performance, and as integral to quality and safety of service delivery. Teamwork is seen as integral element of health care reform in a context where there is increased emphasis on the need for integrated, “joined up” services across professional and organizational boundaries. Teamwork is seen as key to delivering quality, safe, patient‐centered care by providing a solution to the inherent tension within health care between the need for both specialization and integration in a fragmented, professional division of labor. While policy rhetoric views teamwork as inherently positive and in the collective interest, critics question the normative assumptions and point to the contested and ideological realities of teamwork. Emphasizing the social construction of teamwork, whereby professional and policy institutions shape and constrain its emergence, critics point to the conservative and unintended effects of teamwork such that existing social structures are reproduced rather than transformed. Significantly, if policy ideals for flatter, integrated working through teamwork are to be realized, strategies need to look beyond team members to target the structural conditions – and power interests – in which teamwork exists.
Ethnopharmacology
Authors: Warren Barbara Jones 
Published: February 2014

AbstractEthnopharmacology, or ethnic pharmacology, can be described as the scientific and systematic study of how biological traits and cultural perspectives influence and/or change pharmacological responses for persons from culturally and ethnically diverse populations. The care of patients and their families requires a complex, multifaceted treatment approach. Since the 1990s there has been a growing interest in the role of culture, diversity, and culturally competent processes in the pharmacologic management of patients. This entry provides a description of ethnopharmacology and its evolution, including the role of cultural genetics and epigenetics, the methodological challenges related to the study of ethnopharmacology, and future directions for the role of ethnopharmacology within health care.
Geographies of Global Health
Authors: Brown Tim 
Published: February 2014

AbstractGeographers have recently begun to make a considerable contribution to global health. Most notably, this contribution has involved unpicking the national and international response to the problem of global health and submitting it to critical scrutiny. Such work not only requires paying close attention to the differing ways in which global health is imagined (historically as well as in the contemporary period) but also considering the effects of such imaginings on the material, lived experiences of those most affected.
Health Care Delivery System: Ukraine
Authors: Hankivsky Olena , Vorobyova Anna 
Published: February 2014

AbstractThis entry on the health system in Ukraine will discuss the critical condition of health and health care in the country. Ukraine is in transition and in dire need of reforming its health care delivery system, which still utilizes the highly inefficient Soviet model focused on secondary rather than primary care. International organizations recommend that Ukraine introduces a primary care model to tackle the mortality and morbidity crisis in the country. The government of Ukraine has recently announced the priority it places on improving health outcomes for the population and has launched the first broad‐scale reform, which has been piloted in four regions since the spring of 2012. The success of the reform will depend on the extent to which a new model is advanced that is consistent with a primary care model of health care delivery, is able to address the specific needs of the population, and prioritizes the social determinants of Ukrainian health through new health and health‐related policy strategies and priorities.
Eugenics
Authors: Kaelber Lutz 
Published: February 2014

AbstractThe term “eugenics” was coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883 to denote being “well born,” and the pursuit thereof as a new science. Advanced by advocates of social Darwinism willing to apply sociologist Herbert Spencer's principle of “survival of the fittest” to human populations, it came to stand for the idea that a society could be advanced if it managed to improve the hereditary qualities of its people. The advancement could occur by encouraging reproduction among those judged valuable (“positive eugenics”) while providing disincentives to those who were considered “defective” or “deficient” (“negative eugenics”). Eugenics promised to provide a biological solution to what were considered core social problems in the first decades of the twentieth century, including poverty, criminality, and vice. Its implementation included sterilization laws that led to 350,000 sterilizations in Nazi Germany and 70,000 sterilizations in the United States, and in Nazi Germany even to “euthanasia,” the murder of people with disabilities.
Stress, Mattering, and Health
Authors: Fazio Elena Marie , Nguyen Kim B. 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
A central concern of social stress research is to understand the diverse psychosocial resources that condition the influence of stress exposure on health and well‐being. As articulated in the stress process, positive self‐conceptions are thought to act as mediators and moderators of stress, which in turn diminish the deleterious impact of stress on mental and physical health. In this regard, self‐concepts such as mastery and self‐esteem have consistently emerged in the literature as playing significant and powerful buffering roles against stressors. Mattering, on the other hand, despite its demonstrated efficacy in protecting against manifestations of stress, has received far less attention as a critical intervening link in the stress–health relationship. This entry provides an overview of the conceptual and methodological issues that have guided research on mattering before elaborating on findings related to mattering's role in the connection between social stress and health‐related outcomes.
Mental Health and Self‐Esteem
Authors: Maddux James E. 
Published: February 2014

Abstract

To esteem something is to value it and to view it as having worth. Self‐esteem (sometimes also referred to as
self‐worth
), therefore, refers to valuing one's self and viewing one's self as having worth. There is a cognitive component (beliefs about one's value and worth) and an emotional component (how one feels – happy, sad, angry, fearful) to evaluating the self and appraising one's own worth. Self‐esteem is usually distinguished from
self‐concept
, which is a set of beliefs about one's characteristics, attributes, and abilities but without the evaluative component. Self‐esteem is the result of the evaluation and appraisal of one's characteristics and attributes as more or less positive, adequate, and competent or more or less negative, inadequate, or incompetent. Self‐esteem is also distinguished from
self‐efficacy
, which is a set of beliefs concerned with one's abilities to accomplish valued life goals.
Qualitative Research Methods
Authors: Guest Greg , Tolley Elizabeth E. , Wong Christina M. 
Published: February 2014

Abstract
The use of qualitative methods in public health inquiry can be traced to some of the earliest civilizations, and has continued through the centuries. And although qualitative methods have not historically comprised the vanguard of public health research, they have gained increasing acceptance, particularly over the past four decades. Qualitative research is now commonly used and accepted within most fields of public health. In this entry we describe some of the common features of qualitative research, including a range of data collection techniques and approaches to data analysis. We then briefly discuss criteria for assessing the quality of qualitative research studies and their findings. Finally, we provide several examples of studies that employed qualitative methods in order to highlight their potential use in formative or evaluation research, or in primary or secondary data analysis.