Value Of Sociology In Nursing

1.3 Sociology and Nursing

As disciplines Sociology deals the components of society in detail and its relationships, differences and solidarity. The Nursing is concentrating on the role of nurses in healing the patients and promoting the health positively. The nurse is coming from the one of the societies and she delivers her best to the humans. The key to understanding nursing 's relationship with sociology is the profession 's concern to control and develop its knowledge base. The nurses by and large depend on physicians for their education and training, and in the process the nurses have been engaged in a long duration to establish epistemological isolation from medicine. The nursing curricula developed that embraced an eclectic

In the early 1990s there was a lively debate in the nursing literature about the value of sociology 's inclusion in nursing curricula (Cooke 1993, Sharp 1994, 1995, Porter 1996, Mulholland 1997). The catalyst was an article by Cooke (1993), that appeared in Nurse Education Today, which was broadly supportive of the benefits of sociology for nursing but critical of its current mode of integration into nurse education. According to Cooke, the importance of the sociological imagination (Mills 1959), as a vehicle for encouraging nurses to distance themselves from taken-for-granted assumptions and to look at the social world through a new interpretative lens. Further, the Cooke encourages a more critical perspective within nursing. He adds that the Sociology has been inclined to be used for professional purposes. To provide an intellectual basis for nurses ' claims to a unique holistic approach is need of the hour. Although nurses have not been quite as reluctant to research themselves they have been highly selective in what they have taken from sociology. They have been rather more comfortable with a self-image which projects them as engaged in a liberating project from the gendered oppressions of medicine than as involved in the very same claims for power as those they claim

There are others, however, who have questioned the usefulness of sociology to nursing, irrespective of its mode of incorporation into the curricula. Writing from a sociological standpoint, Sharp (1994, 1995) has problematical the value of sociological knowledge to nursing practice. He argues that sociology 's multiparadigmatic character cannot serve an `action based ' practice, such as nursing. In his view, the main value of sociology for nursing lies in the techniques of sociological research. But, as he rightly points out, the different theoretical traditions within sociology give rise to quite different conclusions as to the value of different methods, and it is an understanding of these kinds of epistemological and ontological issues which is as yet underdeveloped in nursing. Sharp 's arguments have been challenged by Porter who disputes his characterization of nursing as `action-based '. According to Porter (1996) nursing practice is inherently reflexive and as such is perfectly compatible with sociological knowledge. Many of the debates about the value of sociology to nursing are founded on an implicit acceptance of nursing as a `secondary knowledge form ' (Hirst, 1975, Mulholland 1997), that is, a composite interdisciplinary area of