Social science and the study of pain since Zborowski: a need for a new agenda

In 1969, anthropologist Mark Zborowski published People in Pain, in which he showed that pain is responded to by behaviors and attitudes learned by pain sufferers within the cultures in which they are socialized. Research for this work was accomplished at a time when a number of social scientists were deeply involved in inquiry about the relationship between the individual psyche and society, and were, therefore, interested in subjective experiences of individuals. For reasons discussed in this article, social researchers shifted their focus, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, from the study of subjective experience to research pertaining to more objectively verifiable phenomena. Consequently, because pain is not easily measurable, relatively few studies illuminating the human experience of pain were performed by social scientists since Zborowski completed his work. This article provides an overview of the small but pertinent research that has been conducted since the late 1960s, and challenges social scientists to develop a new agenda for the study of pain experiences. This research may be especially timely now, when there seems to be renewed interest among social scientists to study subjective experiences.