Social Determinants Of Health: A Case Study On The White Family Example Paper

Ten Important Social Determinants Of Health

In all developing as well as developed countries, studies conducted by eminent researchers have noted that people who are less well off tend to develop a shorter life expectancy and lack of proper qualities of life than the people who are influential and well off. This discrimination is not only present in the health quality of individuals and also in social injustice but also present as some of the most powerful determinants of health standards that are present in modern societies (Perrin 2013). The social determinants of health can be described as the social and the economic conditions which mainly govern the health status of individuals or groups of people. They can be described as the health promoting factors which are intricately associated with an individual’s living and working conditions (Marmot and Allen 2014). These include factors like wealth, income, power as well as influence rather than individual risk factors which include genetics or behavioral factors. The following essay will mainly portray case study of the White Family where the various social determinants of health had negative impacts on the life of the family members. Besides, it will also portray that how the effects will have a multigenerational impact on the children of the family making them vulnerable to poor quality life in future.

World Health organization has put forward ten important social determinants of health which they believe to create humongous effect on the health of each and every citizen of every nation. These factors in turn govern the mental as well as physical health of individuals ultimately shaping the quality of life that they experience (Rubin 2016). The ten important determinants of health include the social gradient, early life, stress, work, social exclusion, unemployment, social support, transport, addiction and food. All these ten important factors determine how well a person would be thriving in his comfort zone dedicating the best parts to his family and for society and nation (Braveman and Gottlieb 2014). In case of the White family, it was seen four important social determinant of health played a major role in determining the course of their family as well as the peace that harbored in their family previously.  Social Determinants Of Health: A Case Study On The White Family Example Paper

The first social determinant of health is stress that seemed to be intricately associated with the couple’s happiness. Anne has shifted to her mother’s place as her mother Greta had returned from rehabilitation centre due to cardiovascular accidents. Therefore, Anne had to take care of her mother as she was the only daughter. However, while taking care of an aged ailing patient, she had to dedicate a lot of time for her which was not only physically demanding for her but also was mentally draining for her. In comparison to that, her husband John was not supporting her while caring for her mother and she had to take care and do all her duties herself. John was getting agitated as he was not getting enough time from Anne due to Greta who was distressing for him as well. As John was continuously abusing her she developed immense stress from the fact that she was neither being able to be a good carer as well as a good wife. Both Anne’s and John’s daughter Jessica had asthma at a very tender age and was continuously needed to be monitored to protect her from any armful outcome. Therefore, being parents to an ailing child who is a high risk of asthmatic attack and taking care of her also create a stress on the parents. Moreover Anne’s feelings that her son Dylan is not properly behaving with her and is not mixing with the right groups of friends had created another source of stress for her as it has given her a feeling that she was an unsuccessful mother not being able to correctly nurture her children. All the stress had made her to take up the habit of continuously munching different food products. This as a result increases the risk of her exposure to the chronic disorder of obesity. This physical disorder will only contribute to the mental instability that Anne of facing and will be an additional factor that will harm her quality of life (Adler et al. 2016).

The Impact Of Stress

The next social determinant of health that impacted the life of the White couple was unemployment. It was seen that John had to leave his job due to his back injury and was not getting any work since he was not fully recovered from his back injury. As a result he always suffered from a feeling of inferiority complex as he developed the feeling that he could not act as the head of the family. This affected his self confidence and his self respect and often failed to handle these feeling effectively. These feelings often poured out as aggression on his wife Anne. Anne had to leave her job to become a full time carer for her mother and to attend her kids with full concentration. However lack of employment created a financial crisis for which they were not being able to live a comfortable livelihood and had to compromise with the present living conditions. Researchers suggest that job security increases the health as well as the well being and also results in job satisfaction (Evans 2015). It has become a concern to the Whites that as they are not financially stable, it may impact the life of their daughter who has asthmatic issues and will not be able to give a proper future as well as happiness to their children and also they themselves would not be able to live happily.

The next social determinant that had impacted the lives of the Whites is addiction. John is addicted to alcohol which had worsened the quality of his life and has turned him into a perpetrator causing domestic violence on his wife Anne. Anne had stated that although John forces her to believe that he had left alcohol but he had often returned home in a drunken state and had cleared his frustrations by physically abusing Anne. However, the case study about John clearly shows that he is a concerned man for his family and tends to think about their betterment. However, the present circumstances had resulted in severe mental breakdown of John making him take resort to alcohol. Addiction, as said by eminent researchers, results in creation of a mirage that helps in escaping from different adversity as well as stress (DeAndae et al. 2014). However, this often results in a boomerang effect that only worsens the present situation. People usually take the pathway of alcohol to decrease the pain of different harsh social as well as economic conditions thinking it will relieve them and make things stable. However, alcohol dependence is leading to downward social mobility which in turn not only affects the person’s quality of lives but also makes him criminal in different cases (Garg et al. 2015). It was seen that this addiction mad John torture Anne which affected her ego and self respect and shocked her because she never expected her person of love would be heinous to her. All these lead her to a feeling of hopelessness and depression making her anxious about what could she do to change the situation. Hence a situation of stress, tension, hopelessness, frustration and depression had been found to accompany both the members and therefore it seemed very difficult for them to overcome.

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The Effect Of Unemployment

Bandura’s social learning theory states that people learn from one another via the pathways of observation, imitation as well as modeling. Many researchers suggest that this theory often acts as the connecting link between the cognitive as well as the behaviorist learning theory as it has been seen to incorporate the three basics foundations of learning (Embrett and Randall 2014). These three are the attention, motivation as well as memory. To shed some more light on it, it can be described as the learning that people attends to by observing the behavior of the others, attitudes and also the outcome of the behaviors. Researchers have suggested that most of the human behaviors are learnt by people observationally that is by observing others, developing an idea about how new behaviors are performed and also utilizing the newly learnt information as a guide when similar situation arises in the lives of the individuals.

The first step is called the attention stage. At this stage, a number of factors usually help an individual to either increase as well as decrease the amount of attention paid (Donkin et al. 2014). This mainly includes distinctiveness, prevalence, functional value, affective valence, complexity and others. It was seen that Dylan white as well as Jessica were audiences of the domestic violence that their father had on their mother Anne and also to some extent for their grandmother Greta. Hence the children are attending to such a behavior of their father which may tend to affect their cognitive ability as they do not have the knowledge to ascertain between the rights and wrongs of different morals and virtues.

The second step is called the retention period where a particular child remembers what he has paid attention to. They mainly store such a behavior in the forms of symbolic coding, mental images, symbolic rehearsal, cognitive organization as well as motor rehearsal. It has been mostly seen that children tend to attend and remember those behaviors which are conducted by people of the same gender (Funder 2015). Hence there remains a high risk, as Dylan will incorporate such behavior in his mind which might impact his activities in the future when he has an own family of himself. Moreover Jessica will also tend to develop a same behavior of feeling weak and giving up to situation like her mother and will never learn the skill to stand upright and take initiatives in her order to fight consequences making him into her own favor.

The Problem Of Addiction

The third step is called the reproduction phase where the individual reproduces the image when a certain situation arises where such behavior can bring out benefit or positive results (Rosenthal and Zimmerman 2014). In the aspect of the case study, it can be stated that when Dylan grows up and has a family of his own, he may reproduce the behavior that he has learnt from his father. This behavior may make him a criminal in his adult life where such consequences may put him behind bars or destroy the quality of his life and life his partner. This may in turn be transferred to his children affecting the life of his entire family (Chen, Wang and Hung 2015). Moreover aggression of Dylan also may harm his feelings towards his mother resulting in elder abuse as well. On the other hand Jessica will also be submissive in her actions in her future and will not be able to handle any strenuous situation by critically analyzing it and applying correct decisions to overcome them. Her mental strength will also be weak making her difficult to overcome any barriers that come in front of her in her life.

The last stage of the learning mechanism is the motivation stage. This stage mainly includes the outcomes that results when the individual performs the behavior. This may include motives such as traditional behaviorism, vicarious which includes the seeing as well as recalling the reinforced model and also the promised which are actually the imagined incentives (Bethards 2014). This stage mainly is governed by either the punishment that results if the behavior is performed or contains the reward that the individual gets after the behavior. This will decide whether the behavior would be repeated or not (Cheung, Liu and Li 2015). In case of the Dylan, it is very well seen that John thinks it to be normal and therefore does not punished him for such impolite behaviors and wrong habits. Moreover Anne is also seen unable to control her son as she is always depressed thinking herself to be responsible for everything rather than teaching her son his guilt. Hence, as Dylan is not punished by his parents, he may continue this behavior in the future which may in turn harm his future life making the same habit to be adopted by his son.

Previously, the biomedical model of healthcare only considered different microorganisms as well as disruption of any physiological process as the main reason for development of diseases and different health care issues (Bethards et al, 2014).. However modern researchers mainly rely on biopsychosocial model of healthcare. It suggests that not only biological factors but also several psychological as well as social factors become responsible for the occurrence of the disorders and other impacts on social lives.

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory And Its Application

In case of Anne, it was seen that she was suffering from depression and hopelessness which was the actual impact. This was mainly due to the stress she was experiencing regarding her family members. The potential impact that Anne might face in the future is obesity. As she eats in an unbalanced fashion in order to cope up with the stress, she may take in excessive amounts of calories that might hamper her life. Moreover, another potential effect is that she might face terrible accidents as her husband is prone to physically abuse her which might harm her physically or mentally making her lose herself respect. Another potential impact may be she will undergo social exclusion to conceal her family situations fearing to face shameful comments and also due to loss of self-image.

In case of john, the actual impact is that he is facing anxiety at the thought that whether he would ever be able to work due to his back injury. Moreover another actual impact is seen which the preliminary stage of bipolar disorder are. Although he loves each and every member of the family, he is not being able to express his concerns for them. Rather he is becoming violent and abusing his wife. Another potential impact would be that he would get gradually entangled in the cycle of alcohol addiction and may suffer from substance abuse disorder harming his quality of life

Therefore from the entire analysis done above, one can clearly visualize how different social determinants of health may result in severe deterioration of family life of each and every members resulting in loss of peace and happiness.

References:

Adler, N.E., Cutler, D.M., Jonathan, J.E., Galea, S., Glymour, M., Koh, H.K. and Satcher, D., 2016. Addressing Social Determinants of Health and Health Disparities. Discussion Paper, Vital Directions for Health and Health Care Series. National Academy of Medicine, Washington, DC. https://nam. edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/addressing-social-determinantsof-health-and-health-disparities. pdf.

Bethards, M.L., 2014. Applying social learning theory to the observer role in simulation. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, 10(2), pp.e65-e69.

Braveman, P. and Gottlieb, L., 2014. The social determinants of health: it’s time to consider the causes of the causes. Public health reports, 129(1_suppl2), pp.19-31.

Chen, M.F., Wang, R.H. and Hung, S.L., 2015. Predicting health-promoting self-care behaviors in people with pre-diabetes by applying Bandura social learning theory. Applied Nursing Research, 28(4), pp.299-304.

Cheung, C.M., Liu, I.L. and Lee, M.K., 2015. How online social interactions influence customer information contribution behavior in online social shopping communities: a social learning theory perspective. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(12), pp.2511-2521.

de Andrade, L.O.M., Pellegrini Filho, A., Solar, O., Rígoli, F., de Salazar, L.M., Serrate, P.C.F., Ribeiro, K.G., Koller, T.S., Cruz, F.N.B. and Atun, R., 2015. Social determinants of health, universal health coverage, and sustainable development: case studies from Latin American countries. The Lancet, 385(9975), pp.1343-1351.

Donkin, A., Allen, M., Allen, J., Bell, R. and Marmot, M., 2014. Social Determinants of Health and the Working?Age Population. Contemporary Occupational Health Psychology: Global Perspectives on Research and Practice, Volume 3, pp.1-17.

Embrett, M.G. and Randall, G.E., 2014. Social determinants of health and health equity policy research: exploring the use, misuse, and nonuse of policy analysis theory. Social Science & Medicine, 108, pp.147-155.

Evans, C.R., 2015. Innovative Approaches to Investigating Social Determinants of Health-Social Networks, Environmental Effects and Intersectionality (Doctoral dissertation).  Social Determinants Of Health: A Case Study On The White Family Example Paper