Structure and meaning in medical sociology

The point of all this, one made by others as well (e.g., Cook and Reichhardt 1979), is to emphasize the potential for a synergistic exchange between structuralists who do surveys and meaning-oriented workers who do qualitative work. The ways in which survey researchers come to understand the social worlds of people can and should be influenced by the ways in which people understand and interpret their own worlds. Correspondingly, our efforts to capture the social life of people through their eyes can be advanced by an understanding of the structures in which their lives are embedded and the effects of these structures. Each orientation benefits from drawing on the other. In this way, sociology is the ultimate beneficiary. I see nothing to be gained from intellectual antagonism and the distancing of one side from the other. I do not claim that there is more similarity and less difference between the two than meets the eye. The substance of interests and the styles of inquiry are really quite different. That's as it should be. Indeed, their differences permit each to give something to the other. Both should be nurtured and developed. However, in the training of new medical sociologists and in the research of old ones, we should have enough appreciation and knowledge of both orientations so that even if we are planted firmly in one, we are at least prepared to dip into the other. Those searching for structural effects and those searching for meaning are potentially natural partners, a relationship much superior to being unnatural antagonists.