IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v20y1985i10p1013-1021.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A health economist on medical sociology: Reflections by an unreconstructed reductionist

Author

Listed:
  • Culyer, A. J.

Abstract

Eleven papers in medical sociology, recommended as representative by the Medical Sociology Group of the British Sociology Association, are evaluated by a health economist using five criteria: appeal of intellectual content, insights into political philosophy, explanatory power, predictive power and opportunities for social improvements. The paper concludes that the medical sociology literature is quite weak when judged by these criteria, though stronger on some than others. Sociologists often seem to confuse issues that involve value judgements with ones that do not, and generally seem to display a disconcerting obsession with methodological issues of the most fundamental kind that has inhibited medical sociology from developing interesting analyses of many issues on which, in principle, it ought to have much to offer.

Suggested Citation

  • Culyer, A. J., 1985. "A health economist on medical sociology: Reflections by an unreconstructed reductionist," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 20(10), pages 1013-1021, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:20:y:1985:i:10:p:1013-1021
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(85)90257-6
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:20:y:1985:i:10:p:1013-1021. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.