Critically Evaluate Sociological Contributions To

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“Ethnicity is a concept referring to a shared culture and way of life, especially as reflected in language, folkways, religious and other institutional forms, material culture such as clothing and food, and cultural products such as music, literature and art” (Johnson, 2000). This is a direct reference from the Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, neatly summing up ethnicity in terms of this essay. The essay will further explain the key concepts of ethnicity and race, and go onto explain various sociological reasons as to why there are health inequalities. To understand why an explanation of health inequalities between different ethnic groups is needed, first, an understanding of the statistics themselves need to be understood. Using data from the 2001 census, it can be seen that both Pakistani and Bangladeshi people, of both sexes, have the worst reported health, in terms of having ‘not good’ health (ONS, 2004. [Online]). In the same research, it can be observed that the Chinese had the lowest percentage ‘not good’ health. It is clear to see that differences do occur, however different explanations as to why the differences occur are forwarded by many different sociologists. Initial researchers that attempted to focus upon health in terms of sociology often made reference to the genetic differences between people, including the idea of race. Their efforts were focused on offering a scientific explanation as to why health differences occur. Scientific explanations tend to focus upon quantitative data, and the direct analysis of this generalised data (Blaikie, 2003). The implication of this kind of focus was that some ethnic groups were more susceptible to certain types of illness by their very nature. Nazroo lead the idea that there possibly could be biological differences, noting that in research, it was found that South Asians were more susceptible to
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