1. How is health examined from a sociological perspective?

2. How is illness functional in society? What behavior is expected from someone who is sick?

3. Explain from a conflict perspective how health inequalities are shaped by conflict and competing interests between groups.

4. Using eating disorders as the basis for your answer, examine how illness and disease are socially constructed.

5. Review the inequalities of health and health care access by gender, race/ethnicity, and social class.

6. Why is the United States the last industrial country to adopt a national health care program? Which sociological perspective(s) best explains why public and political support for health care reform has been difficult to achieve?

7. Do you know what a “mommy job” is? Mentioned on ABC’s Brothers and Sisters program and featured in print and television advertisements, a mommy job is a cosmetic surgical procedure that may include a breast lift, a tummy tuck, and liposuction to reduce the stretch marks, slackened skin, and excess fat that result from pregnancy and childbirth. Targeting women of childbearing age, the marketing of mommy makeovers has been described as an attempt to “pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and child birth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels” (Singer 2007:E3). From a sociological perspective, is a mommy job a surgical necessity or an invention? What do you think?