Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness, and Healing

The Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness & Healing advances the understanding of medical sociology by identifying the most important contemporary challenges to the field and suggesting directions for future inquiry. The editors provide a blueprint for guiding research and teaching agendas for the first quarter of the 21^st century.

In a series of essays, this volume offers a systematic view of the critical questions that face our understanding of the role of social forces in health, illness and healing. It also provides an overall theoretical framework and asks medical sociologists to consider the implications of taking on new directions and approaches. Such issues may include the importance of multiple levels of influences, the utility of dynamic, life course approaches, the role of culture, the impact of social networks, the importance of fundamental causes approaches, and the influences of state structures and policy making.

Bernice A. Pescosolido is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and Director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research. Professor Pescosolido received a B.A. from the University of Rhode Island in 1974 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982. She has focused her research and teaching on social issues in health, illness, and healing. Jack K. Martin is the Director of the Karl F. Schussler Institute for Social Research at Indiana University. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Utah in 1980 and has been on the faculty at Indiana University since 2001. Anne Rogers is Professor of the Sociology of Health Care and Head of the Health Sciences Research Group at the University of Manchester. Her research interests lie broadly within the sociology of health care, mental health and most recently social networks, relationships and personal long term condition management. Her research has ranged from exploring, patients experience of psychiatric services, the social patterning of mental health problems, lay epidemiology, professional knowledge and sociological analysis of old and new forms of treatment. Her recent research interests include a focus on the 'work' that patients undertake in the area of long term condition management and addressing how social position, networks, relationships and illness work undertaken in domestic settings connect to accessing resources in local communities and health services to support living with long term condition management. Jane D. McLeod is Professor of Sociology and Director of Undergraduate Studies. She also teaches in the Human Biology Program. Jane came to IU in 1998, after serving on the faculties at the University of Minnesota and SUNY-Albany. Her research traverses the areas of social psychology, medical sociology, sociology of mental health, stratification, and the life course.