Hospice Care Questions
1. Why do sociologists consider 19th-century hospitals to have been total institutions?
2. What led to the development of voluntary hospitals? Public hospitals? The modern hospital as we know it?
3. How has the nature of hospitals changed in recent years?
4. Why did hospices emerge? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
5. Who uses nursing homes, how is this changing, and why?
6. How does the process of commodification affect nursing assistants? How does it affect nursing home residents?
7. Why has home care grown? What are the difficulties faced by family caregivers?
8. What is technology? What do sociologists mean when they say that technology is inherently neither good nor bad and neither a blank slate nor a force outside of human control?
9. What is the social construction of technology? What does it mean to say that this is a political process?
10. Why was CPR so widely adopted even though it is so ineffective?
11. What is the technological imperative? What social factors encourage it?
CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS
1. What are the burdens faced by family caregivers, and how have these changed over time? If you were on your governor’s Task Force on Health Care, what policies might you want to implement to lighten those burdens?
2. If you could go back into the past and change one thing in the history of hospitals, what would it be? Why?
3. How can society shape technology? How can technology shape society?
4. Why might sociologists and other observers argue against early detection and treatment of prostate cancer?
