smoking
Cigarette smoking is still the most important preventable cause of premature death in Australia. It has been found that the use of tabacco has resulted in a loss of more than 18,000 lives in Australia each year, while costing the Australian community more than $12.7 billion per annum, which in annual economic costs in terms of lost years of life, loss of income and medical and related costs, were estimated to be at around two percent of the gross national product . Thus, reducing the prevalence of smoking rightly remains a high priority on Australia's public health agenda. In this paper, I will describe the way in which a structural functionalist approach is implicit in the area of health promotion programmes on smoke free environments.Aaron Antonovsky proposed that health is created where people live, love, learn, work and play. This ultimately results to a disproportionately prevalent use of tobacco, where it is found that smoking prevalence is inversely related to education and socioeconomic status. This complements the structuralist theory, which assumes that, what people believe and how individuals behave, is mediated through social institutions. Structural functionalists argue that social institutions like the famil
Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health . Aaron Antonovsky proposed that health is created where people live, love, learn, work and play. Parsons contemplated that the roles and actions must have meanings and be governed by the understood shared values for the mutual adjustments. Take for example smoking for instance, smoking prevalence is inversely related to socio-economic status and it has been found that smoking is often used as a stress coping or as a psychological reward by low-income single mothers. Such persons often manifest unhealthier lifestyles partly as a coping or reward mechanisms for relatively unhappy lives due to poverty. Influential functionalists emphasise medicine's role to cure and to maintain the "normal" functioning of individuals and of society. In this model, the "sick role" involves being compliant and wanting to get well Parsons in his theory suggested that the society is composed of many interlinking strata and each of the strata has to perform a specific role to accomplish a successful social action. Secondly, Environment shapes behavior advocated by the social learning theory augments this process of shaping behavior. It was found in studies that social support to smoking cessation programs was important in the determinants of cessation . Whilst the presence of encouragement by household members to quit is a strong predictor of change of behavior, smoke-free homes and workplaces would further enhance this change of behavior towards the goals of not smoking. Finally, the aspect of subjective norms in the theory of reasoned action is also identified to the contribution to behavior change by an individual's motivation to comply with those other people's wishes. The evidence of this theory was observed after a stron
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Approximate Word count = 1238
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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