WHAT IS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION? WHAT ARE THE KEY DEFINITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION?

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WHAT IS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION? WHAT ARE THE KEY DEFINITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION?

In this essay, the author will be defining what social construction is. It will also talk about the characteristics of social construction. Secondly the essay will explain how illness is socially constructed and what types of illness that can be social constructed. Social construction can be defined as anything that is invented or constructed by people in a particular society. Paul A. Boghossian states that social construction is to emphasize its dependence on contingent aspects of our social selves. This means that things could not have existed had people not built it.

Social construction has been also defined as "the way people view themselves and others is not natural but shaped by the society in which they live" (Marshall, 1998). Society does see the world directly but through lenses. Illness is seen as social construct through two dimensional, which are eastern medicine and their version definition of illness and the western medicine and their definition of illness. In alternative medicine, patients are classified by body type. Illness is considered to be a matter of imbalance of the body; therefore treatment is aimed at restoring balance to the mind and body system.
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(West, 1993)

Where as the western medicine define illness as an impairment of the physiological function affecting parts or all of an organism (Nettleton, 1995). The different nature of eastern and western ideas of nature explains that illness is a socially constructed concept. There are factors that contribute and have control over social construction of illness. These factors are culture, religion, class and gender.

In this day societies, there are common belief that our bodies are like machine and doctors are mechanics. Moreover in the olden days, it was religious figures like gods who determined what ...

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