ABSTRACT
Research on the process of decision-making from within medical sociology and social psychology has tended to move away from motivation and determinants of decision-making as fixed attributes of the individual. During the 1960s and 1970s a number of models of lay referral were developed as a means of understanding help-seeking behaviour. An emerging generation of health-utilization studies and models, example the network-episode model (NEM) and the social organization strategy model, promises to bridge a gap between individualistic and social-process models of decision-making. Social interaction and social networks are incorporated into the mechanisms for seeking help, together with notions of purposive action, economic and psychological rationality and 'utility maximization', drawn from the rational choice model of decision-making. The relevance of the NEM model for understanding primary care is that it situates an understanding of the management of illness in a context which incorporates elements of formal/informal health care resources and which works across the interfaces between service sectors.
