This course will provide graduate students with a survey of research on the social origins of the health, illness, and health care of individuals and populations. Students will be introduced to the process of formulating important social research questions in health and illness, including attention to major theoretical perspectives, measurement of concepts, the merits of various study designs, and both qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection and analysis. The sociology of health and illness is a large and historically important subdiscipline within the field, distinctively sociological, but with important links to public health, social epidemiology, and health psychology.

More than any other area of the discipline, the sociology of health and illness exemplifies C. Wright Mills’ concept of the “sociological imagination” — the interplay between personal troubles and public issues.

Regular class sessions will be taught on Zoom and will include: an introductory lecture on background concepts, theory, and/or methods; discussion of assigned chapters or articles that have been read by the class and are critiqued by individual students; and a “Minute for Books” with a focus on nonfiction accounts of illness or descriptions of contemporary health care systems. Assigned articles are all posted on Canvas; books chosen for the “Minute for Books” may or may not be available in the Woodruff Library, but they are almost all inexpensive paperbacks available on Amazon. During the semester each student will collaborate with the instructor on a peer review of a journal article. The final two weeks of the semester will be devoted to the presentation of student research projects.