Social health and illness

1. Social and Cultural factor
M.Shaheem Qamar
1st semester
Bs Public Health

2. Social factors
• Represent another important set of influences on consumer
behavior. Specifically, these are the effects of people and groups
influencing one another through culture and
subculture, social class, reference groups, and family.

3. Social Status
• Income, wealth, education, and employment all have implications for
prestige and acceptance in society, and hence may affect health
through psychosocial pathways involved in perceived position in a
social hierarchy. Lower perceived social status has been associated
with adverse health outcomes in some studies even after considering
objective measures of resources and social status (Singh-Manoux et
al., 2003, 2005).

4. Migration
Migration and associated experiences and cultural traditions have
been shown to influence health and health behaviors. Almost 14
percent of the U.S. population in 2008 was born outside the United
States (OECD, 2011e). Although some immigrants are at higher
risk of certain infectious diseases, most recent immigrants to the
United States generally have favorable health profiles compared
with the native-born population.

5. Stress
• Psychological distress that arises from any of the above social factors,
including from social rejection or exclusion associated with racial or
ethnic identification, may lead to worse health through physiologic
mechanisms involved in stress (Matthews et al., 2010; McEwen and
Gianaros, 2010). Those mechanisms include the effects of stress on
the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the sympathetic
nervous system, and immune

6. Homelessness
• Data are limited to compare housing instability in the United States
and other high-income nations. A telephone survey in Belgium,
Germany, Italy
• the United Kingdom, and the United States found that the United
Kingdom (7.7 percent) and the United States (6.2 percent) had higher
lifetime rates of literal homelessness than did the other countries (Toro
et al., 2007).

7. Incarceration
• The United States has the highest incarceration rate among affluent
countries—approximately 750 of every 100,000 U.S. citizens are in prison—
and the rate has been increasing over time (Glaze, 2011; Pew Center on the
States, 2008). Between 1987 and 2007, year-end prison counts in the United
States nearly tripled from 585,084 to 1,596,127 (Pew Center on the States,
2008). And within the United States, the rate of ever having gone to prison
among males was more than six times higher among blacks than whites
(Bonczar, 2003). The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that if
incarceration rates remain unchanged, 6.6 percent of U.S. residents (and
32.2 percent of black males) born in 2001 will go to prison at some point in
their lifetime (Bonczar, 2003).

8. Culture factor
• encompasses the set of beliefs, moral values, traditions, language,
and laws (or rules of behavior) held in common by a nation, a
community, or other defined group of people. Anthropoligists and
epidemiologists have identified many associations between culture,
customs, and risks to health. ...

9. Education
The typical level of completed education in a region can indicate the
quality of a potential work force and the status of consumers.

10. Religion
Religion is a major cultural influencer that can affect many aspects of
life, including the role of women in society, rules about food and
beverage consumption, clothing habits and holiday activitie

11. Ethics and values
• These can have an impact on international business, especially when
conducted from within another country. However, it is important for
researchers to remember that the same ethics and values are not held
by everyone in a target market. They are always dependent on status,
region, ethnicity and religion. Researchers should also consider the
human-rights conduct of any potential market.

12. Material culture
• This includes the technological goods used by the majority of the
population, personal transport (including car ownership) and the
availability of resources such as electricity, natural gas, telephone,
Internet and wireless communication.

13. Languages
• The languages spoken and used in a country have an impact on
marketing, brand names, the collection of information through surveys
and interviews, advertising and the conduct of business relationships.
Languages might vary between regions of a country, and some
countries have more than one official language. For example, Canada
has two official languages, and a third or fourth is spoken in several
areas of the country. Switzerland has four main languages, and Kenya
has 22