Merit 2 – Use different sociological perspectives to discuss patterns and trends of health and illness in two different social groups.
Distinction 1 - Evaluate different sociological explanations for patterns and trends of health and illness in two different social groups.

There are many different factors that can increase your chance of becoming ill and dying. The different factors are social class, gender, age and ethnicity. The different social groups I will look at are social class and gender. I am going to look into how these affect health; I will also explain the pattern and trends. I am using gender because it fits in with the sociological perspective feminism and social class fits in with Marxism.
Social class is how people
Measuring health can be difficult with people in a lower social class. This could be many reasons but one of the main reasons is that they tend to not go to the doctors when they are ill, this means that their illness isn’t recorded and you don’t know what is wrong with them. Another difficulty is that if they do go to the doctor’s two doctors may give two different diagnoses. Also another difficulty could be that someone is making up their symptoms when they may not actually feel ill, if they go to the doctors then an illness is recorded it may not be a true reading.
The feminist approach fits in with gender; gender also has an impact on the patterns and trends in health and illness. Women’s life expectancy is longer than a man’s, with women living approximately 5 years longer than men. The infant mortality rate is higher in boys than it is in girls. There are many reports that are compiled on a regular occasion to show people what the level of illness is, women have a higher level of illness than men but they are more likely to go to the doctors and get checked out for any unusual problems.
There is a higher death rate for men and this is usually associated with the amount of drinking and smoking they do. Men are more likely to drink more than women and they also smoke more, however there are some women that drink and smoke more and less men but the majority of men will