A Content Analysis of the JOURNAL OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR.

Our premise is that trends in medicine and the social sciences converge and point toward a growing collaboration between the perspectives. As this collaboration continues to be pursued and nourished, a fundamental re-evaluation of the axioms of medicine and the epistemology of the social sciences needs to occur. We are interested in seeing if our main medical sociology journal exposes us to material that generates social evidence for both research and teaching initiatives in medical practice. This type of sociomedical work can potentially impact the way research questions are framed, therefore proving fruitful for building bridges between clinicians, researchers and educators. This can be done while maximizing the applicability of social scientific evidence to patient care and health care policy. For our analysis, a content analysis was performed on the JHSB, with the 1995 special issue acting as a focal point. We divided the years into two groups, before and after the special issue. The before group included 1993 to 1997, sans the special issue. 1997 was chosen on the estimation that it would take at least two years to see any change in direction of the journal itself, due to backlog and the review process. The after group included years 1998 through 2002 issue 2, which was the current available issue when the analysis began. For sociology to be a science practiced "with" other sciences and, thus, effectively working toward greater interdisciplinary progress, we feel policy implications are necessary, and policy recommendations ideally would be explicitly stated. We examined articles for interdisciplinary approaches or focus, which would indicate a commitment toward the proliferation of sociology "with" medicine. The data support our early impressions of JHSB as a primarily quantitative journal dealing largely with mental health issues and whose works are predominantly focused back at the discipline of sociology, to the near exclusion of interacting in actual... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]