ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by reviewing the explanations that medical sociologists have traditionally offered to account for the observable patterns of conduct, particularly in relation to official medical services, that are displayed by sick people. It devotes to a more detailed exposition of the basic limitations of the approach, and examines the prior phenomenon of illness itself. The former attempt to account for observed behaviour by reference to the personal characteristics of individuals; these may be sociodemographic indices or may be derived from some form of psychometric assessment. Rosenstock's paper is an attempt to review and synthesise a number of earlier reports on illness behaviour. He proposes, instead, a model based upon the intervention of the personal characteristics of actors in the sequence of decisions that constitute illness behaviour. E. A. Suchman's analysis is based on data collected in a survey of the medical contacts of a probability sample taken from an ethnically and socially heterogeneous district of New York.
