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The health system is a complex system of systems – changes in agriculture, transportation, economics, family life, medical practices, and many other things can have a profound influence on health and health costs. Yet today, policy-level investment decisions are frequently made by modeling individual systems in isolation. We describe two sets of issues that we face in trying to develop a platform, method, and service for integrating expert models from different domains to support health policy and investment decisions. The first set of questions concerns how to develop accurate social and behavioral health models and integrate them with engineering models of transportation, clinic operations, and so forth. The second set of questions concerns the design of an environment that will encourage and facilitate collaboration between the health modelers themselves, who come from a wide variety of disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed systems are growing increasingly complex in the sense that they need to reorganize on a regular basis to respond to external opportunities. At the same time research has shown that performance is improved where technology support is aligned to people΄s activities within the system. This paper provides a framework for ensuring that such alignment is maintained during system evolution. The paper first defines the nature of change using complexity theory as the foundation for defining the nature of change. It then builds on the idea of socio-technical gaps to identify the gaps created by a change. The changes are then outlined in terms of perspectives to provide a systematic basis for managing change. To do this change is expressed in terms of the perspectives to provide a meaningful way to respond to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ecological perspective is a useful conceptual framework that takes into account multiple levels of influence that affect eating behavior of older adults. Eating behavior of older adults is influenced simultaneously by intrapersonal (i.e., individual characteristics), interpersonal (i.e., interpersonal processes and primary groups), institutional (i.e., norms and structures), community (i.e., social networks and norms), and public policy factors (local, state, and federal policies and laws). Addressing these multiple factors is key to effectively implementing nutritional interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 51 of the book "HANDBOOK OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS," VOLUME 4, edited by T. Paul Schultz and John Strauss is presented. It discusses social and economic factors that motivate individuals to live together in households, which are significant in poor countries. It also focuses on the role of marriage in forming the main building block of most households, alongside marriage dissolution and other changes in household structure.

Human resources, as one of most important element, of the geoeconomical system is often interpreteted like only isolated demographic phenomena. The article deals the relationship of the changing of quantative and qualitative characteristics with more different environment: economical, social, political, ekological. The aim of article to analyse the number, structure, natural movement and migration of population at the period after the Independency of Lithuania was restored. Also we guess to estimate the possible positive and negative variants of demographic forecasts and concequences of deacreasing of fertility, increasing mortality, migration and ageing of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Book 5 Chapter 6 of "Sybil, or the Two Nations" is presented. It explores the journey of Sybil towards the secret meeting place of his father Gerard, with the aid of direction given by Mr. Hatton to her. It also highlights the different dangers that she has been through as she tried to find the place being described by Mr. Hatton.

Chapter 4 of the book "Seeing the Bigger Picture: Understanding Politics Through Film & Television," by Mark Sachleben and Kevan M. Yenerall is presented. It highlights the history of the American presidency portrayed on films. It discusses on how films have depicted real presidents with fictitious political leaders. It outlines the possible factors responsible for the significant explosion of presidency films in the 1990s, most of which presented the political arena in a negative situation.

Chapter 4 of the book "The Culture of Classroom Silence," by Sandra Leanne Bosacki is presented. It outlines methods that may influence the sense of self and experiences of adolescents on classroom silence. It examines educational strategies that focus on the social and emotional factors of silence experience to effectively promote the benefits of silence. It explores the characteristics of the learner and the environment.

Chapter 4 of the book "The Sage Handbook of Sociology" is presented. It explores the diversity and insularity of sociological traditions and the social processes through which sociology is formed and changed. The rise and fall of tradition are shaped by various cultural, ideological, institutional, cognitive, and social factors. And among these factors, culture was found to be the most influential which stressed the importance of natural and social realms.

The article discusses the first part of "The European Health Report" of the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe about the overall health situation in the continent. It says that the average gain in life expectancy in European Union nations between 1970 and 1998 was 6.4 years at birth, 4.9 years at age 15, and 3.4 years at age 65. It mentions that the importance of social and economic factors as major determinants of public health was reflected from a wide range of studies.

Chapter 2 of the book "The Woman in the Body" is presented. It investigates how major social categories have been described by social historians and anthropologists at the level of the social whole, at the level of the person, and at the level of the body. It describes David Schneider's study of American kinship conducted in the 1960s. Adult humans can be regarded as less than persons based on race.

Foreign words are not integrated into Hebrew. They tend to avoid formations such as verb inflections, the construct state, and possessive pronominal suffixes. Etymologically and morphologically, they remain extraneous to the language. A study examined attitudes toward foreign words in contemporary Hebrew. Regarding absorption of Hebrew equivalents into the language, attitudes toward the social factors that influence the differences of this absorption appear to tend to the social rather that to linguistic factors. Two kinds of linguistic attitudes are discernable, namely, those regarding the language as a value, a symbol of national identification, and those for whom language is a communication instrument serving their personal needs.

The article presents the author's observation on topics discussed in the book Bathing--the Body and Community Care. We have seen how the body lies at the heart of community care, both from the perspective of older and disabled people and careworkers. Community care is bodycare. The experiences of the body and care are mediated through structures of age, gender, race and class. Careworkers and clients bring to the care encounter sets of experiences and cultural assumptions that derive from the wider social world, and these profoundly affect the nature of the exchange. These structures of race intersect with those of class, and many of the tensions that arise in relation to race find their counterpart in class. Most work on home care has assumed a shared culture between working-class women workers and their clients of similar background. Through the use of class distance, clients can also treat careworkers in such a way as to deny them emotional access, and with that some of the key rewards of carework. Care is fundamentally an unequal power relationship. Gender similarly profoundly affects the nature of the care encounter. That care is about age is so obvious as to be often overlooked. We have seen how the body in old age and disability contains a number of ambivalences, and how these centre around the negativities of the body incontinence, decay, bodily failure generally.

This chapter explains the association between mental health and social circumstances. Explaining an association means demonstrating the conditions under which it no longer exists. If an association vanishes under specific conditions, then it is the presence (or absence) of those conditions that accounts for the association.

This chapter introduces three substantive areas that are of particular interest to the sociology of mental health. The first concerns the socially constructed nature of mental illness. The second area deals with the social antecedents, while the third area deals with consequences of mental health.

The article presents information on the chapters of the book "Geographic Perspectives on Soviet Central Asia." The essays in the book on Soviet Central Asia are from a geographic perspective. The purpose of the book is to survey the geography of Soviet Central Asia and to highlight geographic issues in the region. Thus, this book includes chapters on the major divisions of geography, in which basic trends are established and analyzed. For the purposes of this book, Central Asia has been defined as the four southern republics excluding Kazakhstan. One of the assumptions in the book is the importance of testing the universality of societal processes in the Soviet context. The working hypothesis in the book is that people throughout the world tend to react in the same manner to the socioeconomic forces that influence their behavior--whether they live under "capitalism" or "communism" or anything in between.

The article explains that as demands for inter-professional work intensify, inter-professional training and development initiatives should progressively introduce new ways of working, simultaneously facilitating professional review and perhaps realignment of occupational values. Members of established professional groups cannot be expected, however, to abandon their old professional ways easily or to achieve successful collaboration through good intentions alone. The evidence reviewed here clearly shows that occupations are more than technical specifications of practices which might need to be retained. The methods of practice and the values attached to work are deeply embedded in occupational cultures which are as resistant to change as any other cultural structures. The professional integrity of occupational groups, moreover, is significant in shaping an occupation's philosophy, giving both direction and strength to practitioners actions. Without a guiding philosophy, practice remains effectively blindfolded. Researchers and developers of inter-professional work need to consider a broad spectrum of social and psychological factors. Models of inter-professional education and practice now need to be developed, allowing not only the integration of different perspectives from contributing professional groups, but also an integrated social and psychological reconstruction of the nature of professional practice.

This article focuses on the impact of different pathways to social mobility on the leisure activity and other non-work areas of social-life with reference to a study related to the emergence of new middle class and its life-style. In analyzing the social worlds of the subjects in this study, the concept of the habitus is employed to suggest that the new middle class needs to be understood not as a single group but rather as a set of fragmented groupings, fragmented according to the different paths of social mobility followed and structured around these paths, and therefore indicative of the different habitus they possess. In addition, the relative amounts of economic and educational capital possessed can be employed in order to discover possible differentiations in social practices and cultural preferences. The results indicate that professional occupations are associated with social origin, they are less strong than might have been anticipated. Certainly the figures indicate that a sizable minority of those with origins in the working class have achieved considerable mobility. Results also suggest a clear relationship between the types of occupation entered and the educational level of respondents, with professional occupations being clearly associated with graduate levels of education and general management positions being associated more with non-graduates.

Chapter 8 of the book "Social Work in Health Care: A Guide to Professional Practice," is presented. It discusses the psychosocial effects of illness and focuses on variables that must be accounted before any psychosocial treatment plan for a patient is developed. It contains an analysis of the patient's personal history, strengths and weaknesses, social or environmental background, perspective of his medical system, economic resources, response to the illness and life style change caused by the malady.

The individual or couple being treated for infertility is emotionally connected to a larger family and social unit which may also feel the sting of infertility. Wanting to help, they often fail because of a lack of understanding of the many losses which accompany infertility, the difficulty in dealing with another's pain, sexual connotations of infertility, and differences in personalities. The authors briefly examine the emotional needs of infertility patients and then identify ways family and friends can provide support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 3 of the book "Poverty, Ethnicity and Violent Crime," by James F. Short is presented. It discusses the levels of explanation of violent crime, and examines these levels to determine risk factors for violent behavior. It explains the social and individual risk factors which includes psychosocial, macrosocial and microsocial factors for violent crime, and presents information on biological perspectives which can cause violent behavior.

The article focuses on several issues related to "natural" disasters and consider the ecology of risk in California, particularly as it is produced by exposure to earthquakes and other environmental hazards. Understanding the various ways human practices, either individually or collectively, are implicated in disasters has both practical and theoretical significance. The practical significance, of course, is that if one understands how routine human practices, in the face of natural hazards, "cause" disasters, then ameliorative actions can be taken to lessen the severity of future disasters. These actions ultimately must consider the social factors that make people vulnerable if more secure lives are to be achieved. In reviewing the ecology of risk in California, it is important to recognize that one's understandings of the various risks posed are social products and may or may not mirror the "real" risks. In the case of California's earthquake threat, the estimated probabilities of earthquake occurrence are produced, promoted, and revised constantly by public and private sector geoscientists.

The article discusses psychological health of people in a particular set of social conditions. Emile Durkheim in his book "Suicide," states that suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result. Durkheim suggested that, a priori, there are two kinds of extra-social causes sufficiently general to have an influence on the suicide rate. First, within the individual psychological constitution there might exist an inclination, normal or pathological, varying from country to country, which directly leads people to commit suicide. Second, the nature of the external physical environment (climate, temperature, etc.) might indirectly have the same effect. The view that suicide is the consequence of tendencies inherent in each major social type, for example, was undermined by the enormous variations in social suicide rates observed within the same type, suggesting that different levels of civilization are much more decisive.

INTRODUCTION 84 There are two kinds of factor in legal history. The main legal traditions and methods of formation of the law are one kind of factor which has affected the development of law in Europe. This is the sense in which T. F. T. Plucknett used the term in discussing the theme of ‘some factors in legal history’, where he dealt with five elements: Roman law, canon law, custom, legislation, and precedent. All these can be called ‘technical’ factors, since they are sources of law in the strict sense, sources of the rules formulated and laid down by lawyers. There are other kinds of factor, however, which may be called ‘social’; they encompass broad political, socio-economic and intellectual developments and disputes. These affect society as a whole, and through it the law. Although it is plain that social factors do have an impact on the evolution of law, their influence is much harder to trace than that of technical factors, which can sometimes be identified in the sources themselves, for instance when a text states expressly that a rule is adopted from Roman law or refers to the ratio scripta; or where the part played by a particular source is easily identified because – to take the example of Roman law again – the terminology has clearly been lifted from the Corpus iuris. The situation is more complicated if a Roman legal principle is found in a medieval text, but the text does not make use of the Roman terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the range of French sociologist Emile Durkheim's analysis of the interconnectedness of suicide with social and natural phenomena. Durkheim's work are devoted to the negation of doctrines which ascribe suicide to extra-social factors, such as mental alienation, the characteristics of race as studied by anthropology, heredity, climate, temperature, and finally to a negation of the doctrine of "imitation," particularly as represented in the works of Gabriel Tarde whose social theory at the time in France had many followers and against whom Durkheim waged unrelenting warfare within the bounds of scholarly and academic amenities. According to Durkheim, suicide cannot be explained by its individual forms, and since the suicide-rate is for him a distinct phenomenon in its own right, he proceeds to relate currents of suicide to social concomitants. It is these social concomitants of suicide which for Durkheim will serve to place any individual suicide in its proper aetiological setting.

This section presents a discussion on status groups and classes. Class situation means the typical probability of procuring goods, gaining a position in life and finding inner satisfactions, a probability which derives from the relative control over goods and skills and from their income-producing uses within a given economic order. Class means all persons in the same class situation. A property class is primarily determined by property differences. A commercial class by the marketability of goods and services. A social class makes up the totality of those class situations within which individual and generational mobility is easy and typical. Associations of class members class organizations may arise on the basis of all three types of classes. However, this does not necessarily happen. Class situation and class refer only to the same or similar interests which an individual shares with others. In principle, the various controls over consumer goods, means of production, assets, resources and skills each constitute a particular class situation.

The article discusses the shift in economic emphasis of American society. One is the shift in economic emphasis from production to distribution, and along with it, the joining of the struggle for existence with the panic for status. Designers work at the intersection of these trends; their problems are among the key problems of the overdeveloped society. It is their dual investment in them that explains the big split among designers and their frequent guilt; the enriched muddle of ideals they variously profess and the insecurity they often feel about the practice of their craft; their often great disgust and their crippling frustration. The consciousness of men does not determine their existence; nor does their existence determine their consciousness. Between the human consciousness and material existence stand communications and designs, patterns and values which influence decisively such consciousness as they have. The mass arts, the public arts, the design arts are major vehicles of this consciousness. Between these arts and the everyday life, between their symbols and the level of human sensibility, there is now continual and persistent interplay. The most embracive and the most specialized domain of modern society, the cultural apparatus of art, science and learning fulfills the most functions: it conquers nature and remakes the environment; it defines the changing nature of man, and grasps the drift of world affairs; it revivifies old aspirations and shapes new ones. As an institutional fact, the cultural apparatus has assumed many forms. In some societies -- notably that of Russia it is established by an authority that post-dates capitalism: it is thus part of an official apparatus of psychic domination.

This chapter of the book "The Functions of the Executive," by Chester I. Barnard (1938), explores psychological and social factors involved in coöperative systems. According to Barnard, social factors are always present in coöperation, both because of the nature of such a system and because of the effect of social experience upon individuals and their motives. The imputation of experience and choice in the individual require two appraisals in every situation in which other individuals are implicated. The first appraisal is concerned with the individual's powers in the situation; the second is concerned with his determination or volition within the limits set by the individual's powers. This chapter considers the following social factors: the interactions between individuals within a coöperative system; the interactions between the individual and the group; the individual as the object of coöperative influence; social purpose and the effectiveness of coöperation; and individual motives and coöperative efficiency.

Chapter 2 of the book "The Foundations of Personality," by Abraham Myerson is presented. It explores the environmental basis of character and examines the effect of the environment on the mind, the character and the personality of an individual. Moreover, it cites that among the environmental factors that can influence the character of an individual include the family, social status, and education.

This article discusses different scales and indexes used to measure social variables. In general, three groups of variable factors are needed to be observed and measured in any research design that seeks to test a basic hypothesis or social relationship. First is the dependent variable, the effect to be observed and described. Second is the independent variable or variables designated as the causal factor. Sometimes the independent variables must be broken down into component parts, which operate more or less as a unit pattern. Third are intervening or other variables that must be controlled lest they obscure the relationship to be measured by the use of experimental design. Scales have been constructed in substantial numbers to facilitate quantitative description of various factors in human relations. Three areas of social measurement can be identified. Psychometric and social psychological scales include intelligence scales, personality tests and scale, and attitude tests and scales. Demographic scales measure the forms or results of social behavior in large units such as the community, state or nation. Sociometric scales are used to measure social structures and processes. Other scales assess marital adjustment and group dimensions. Regardless of the method used in construction, what the researcher seeks is the scale that best fits his or her problem, has the highest reliability and validity, is precise and is relatively easy to apply.

The article examines the consequences of psychological interventions in dementia. In determining the psychological intervention of diseases, different approaches has been used such as the reality orientation and dementia care mapping. Researcher has concluded that management strategy is composed of psychological and psychosocial interventions in the treatment of patients.

This section presents an introduction to a series of essays which deal with the sociology of mental health. Most of the essays are devoted to the explanation of one elementary observation: disorder is not distributed throughout the society, but occurs more densely within some social strata than others.