ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the social and cultural milieu, and the individual response, in the production of health and disease. The Alameda County Survey in California is a landmark study of the influence of social and community ties on health status. Community studies aim to reveal relationships between cultural, social, behavioural, and psychological processes within a single community or geographic area. Culture change often has a significant impact both on the structure of social relationships, and on access to the material goods and sources and symbols of prestige that contribute to social identity. Mental health research, however, has gone further in understanding the influence of social and cultural determinants on particular health problems, and in searching for their mechanisms of influence. Yet the field of mental health is characterized by a particular difficulty in defining the diagnostic borders between disease entities.
