Nursing with Honours
Do you agree that our behaviour is learned through socialisation? Why?
Reflect on yourself and on the first lecture given by Ms. Jane, provide examples.
Yes. First, let us go through the meaning of socialization. Socialization means the social learning of beliefs and behavior typified by the individual’s adaptation and conformity to social norms. All of this includes learning of expectations, habits, values, motives, skills and beliefs that are necessary to interact with one own’s social group.
Thus, basically socialization is a process that familiarize us with and makes us skilled at the rules for living in the society in an effective manner CITATION Elk72 l 1033 (Elkin, 1972).
Based on the definition stated by Elkin and Handel, Socialization is actually a learning process. Like how did we learned to use the toilet and behave politely by our parents, like how our teacher teaches us about our country history and in some religion where we learned to follow the God commandments, we are actually being socialized.
Based on Miss Jane’s lecture, stated by Schaeffer and Lamm CITATION Sch95 l 1033 (Schaeffer, 1995) socialization means the process whereby people learn the attitudes, values, and actions appropriate to individuals as members of particular culture. Besides, there are many theories of socialization that can help us to understand more the social process. Darwin stated that nature playing a role in our socialization. He did believed that we do have an instinct behavior just like the animals.
This instinct behavior helps us to cope with the environmental contingencies.
Like for example, our instinct of fear to the snakes or other instinct such as denial, greed, revenge, tribal loyalty and our urge to procreate. Meanwhile, Watson is on the other hand did believed that our socialization are also being influenced by nurture. Where people can be socialized or trained to do something and become anything regardless of their genetic background.
Mostly to say that we shaped or developed our behavior based on the things that happen surrounding us. For example, people that came from higher society level, tend to have a better way of living. They are much more concerned about their hygiene and take care of their health since they used to live in urban area. But different from the people of the lower society level, most of them lived in the rural area where the hygiene and cleanliness of the place are not taken care well enough.
So, they tend to get sick since they get used to that kind of environments. Last but not least, Cooley’s theory where he believed there is social mirror in socialization which means the judgment of others tend to shape our personality. Which is actually true because nowadays people mostly like to do something to satisfied others.
For example, like how many hours do we have to spend in front of the mirror choosing the clothes that we have to wear for the day so that people would compliment us. Judgment of others builds our personality because we want to impressed them or make them see or judge us in a good perspective. Their judgment also can make us to be ourselves because what they said make us realized that we do have that special personalities or behaviors that make us different from others.
In addition, there are also agents involved or taking part in socialization. These agents are the family, the schools, peer groups and the mass media. But the most important agent in socialization is the family. Actually, the family always has a biggest impact in the society and has been considered as a social institution. Why family is the most important agent? It is because within the family that the child is first being socialized to serve for the society and not only for its own.
For example, the family teach their children on how to use objects such as reading books, riding a bicycle, wearing clothes and from crawling to walking since baby, how to interact with the society such as respects for the elders, teachers and neighbors, and how the things happen in this world such as stars, trees, universe and include knowing and learning about the religions. Basically process of knowing socialization came first from the family, the nearest and dearest persons to us.
Next, we do learn to socialize in from the school. Other than family we do spend most of our times in school. Imagine like if our class starts in the morning and end up in the evening for about 10 hours, 3650 hours in a year which is include the holidays because some students especially those who live far away did not usually went home during holiday we could not deny how important the school has made in our socialization.
Furthermore, school is just not the place where we do learn math, science or literatures but we also learn how to socialize like making a great teamwork, following the lectures schedule and learning through textbooks. For example, when making a group work we socialize with others in a cooperative manners such as sharing and considering others opinion, respects others decisions and helping those who in needs. Through following the lectures schedules also, we could discipline our attitudes by not coming late to the class, be punctual and submit our assignment before the due dates.
Children also been socialized in school to the different cultures, national and world history through textbooks. They are being exposed more specifically in school about all these different cultures and histories and besides we also start to learn what socialization is about at the university. Other than school, another agent that would likely to influence our socialization is peer groups. Peer groups socialization begins in the earliest years or since we were just a 3 year old kid.
As we grow into teenagers, that process continued. Peer groups socialization is important as we started to develop different identity from our parents and start to learn how to be independence. With peer groups also we have the opportunities to socialize or engage in different types of activities with our peers rather than with the family. Basically to say that peer groups managed us to live or socialize outside the realm of the family. Lastly is the mass media.
Mass media provide a large or wide of information to the society through television, radio, internet and newspapers. Most of the people would spend like hours in front of the television to watch movies, listening to the music on the radio, surfing internet or playing online games and even reading news from the newspapers. From those we learned about new technologies, false behavior or crimes and different culture that make us observed how our society socialized nowadays. So, this proved that mass media greatly influenced our socialization too.
Furthermore, there are some functions of socialization. Socialization is the basic need of survival especially for the new generations. A family needs to ensure that the new members carry the continuation of socialization in order to survive. Just how we could not live without food, drink and shelter we also could not survive without learning how to socialize or building our attitude, morals and values for the maintenance of the culture in society.
Basically, socialization is needed for us to cope with the environmental society in this world or becoming socially functioning person. Besides, socialization also been use to transfer information or knowledge between people. Socialization teaches us to have a social interact or interaction with the society or shortly to known and took more information.
As I mentioned earlier, socialization as the basic need of survival where this is proved that socialization is very important. The important of socialization is, it is a lifelong process for an individual survival. Because we learn socialization since childhood and it does not stop until we reached adulthood. Even until today, there are so many things that we could still learn through socialization.
Socialization also is a process by which that individual becomes social and acquires qualities such as attitudes, morals, values and appropriate actions in his or her life. Not just that, socialization is also important for a society’s survival where all of those qualities that been mentioned earlier were not instinctive but instead been learned within or from the society. This indicates the needs of human contact or interactions in order to develop human behavior or social institution through socialization.
As conclusion, we can say that socialization is a learning process through which an individual adjust himself or herself in society and find his or her role and position in society.
Discuss what is the relevance of studying social science in nursing?
As an introduction, basically social science is the study of community, people and society. Whereas nursing is a profession that mostly involve in taking care of the society, community and people regarding of their health and helping them to recover. Therefore, I want to describe the definition of social science as well as nursing profession respectively and why the studying of social science is important or relevant in nursing practice.
Here, social science is a generic term covering the scientific study of man. It is a discipline or branch of science that deals with the socio-cultural aspects of human behavior where it generally includes cultural anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, criminology and social psychology or basically social science is defined as any scholastic discipline or scientific field that investigates human society CITATION Bab12 l 1033 (Babu, 2012).
Next, nursing is defined as a disciplined involved in the delivery and giving of health care to the society meanwhile profession is an occupation that grows out of society’s needs for special services with skills and advanced knowledge CITATION ADM07 l 1033 (ADMIN, 2007).
Hence, based on the definition of social science and nursing profession respectively, both are well related to each other in terms of knowing and providing especially for the society. In order to give care to the society or people, nursing educations and practices are supposed to learn, investigate in which the study of social science are mostly relevant and important for the nurses to understand more on how to cop well with their behavior on how to gain patients cooperation when providing the health care services.
How study of social science is relevant in nursing, is social science basically teaches us on how to deal with the society. Mostly on their behavior, how to interact with people, knowing their socioeconomics background and their social pathology. All of these elements are essential and important in nursing courier especially in giving care or where we can call it nursing care as social practice. The studies of social science teach us how to socialize with people, community and society and most importantly for nurses to understand the social context of people’s health, families and communities.
Next, let’s take a look at the things I mentioned earlier. Firstly, we know people’s behavior when we socializing with them. Like nurses are not just someone who would only giving health care services, but rather approaches the patients with respect, talking and socialize with them. It is not just the patient but also include the family members.
Nurses job are to make sure that the patients are provided with good health care services, make sure that they want to take the medicines and besides make them understand the need for every procedure are also part of the nurses responsibility too. Sometimes, those things are being the crucial part of the job for certain nurses. As we know, the patients and family member behavior can changes in time based on their moods or easy to say not all people are having the same behavior.
So, this is where the studies of social science take part. By observing and learning the patients and even the family member behavior, the nursing care as social practice can easily be done. For some reasons, this study of social science would encourage more the nurses to face different kind of patients as part of their challenges in nursing profession.
Move on to the role of social science in the way the nurses would interact with the patient. Social science included the way we interact or our interaction with the society. In nursing, the nurses must have a good interaction with the patients. A good interaction between the nurses and the patients could lead to a better understanding.
For example, the nurses would know how to calm the patients in case if the patients feel scared or doesn’t want to cooperate during a procedure, or probably the opposite where if the patient could exactly mention or tell the nurses and physician where they feel hurt or sick, the process of treatment would not be taken or dragged long.
The good interactions between them is so important where at least patient could feel at ease when the nurses comforting or reassuring them and at the same time the nurses would not feel so much burden at work. This social interaction not only should be applied in nurses and patients relationship, but also to the nurses in how to interact with each other where social science actually teach us on how to make a great teamwork. Because, in giving and providing care the nurses are taking care for all the patient.
In social science, the term is actually for the society. So, there are no such things like one patient for a single nurse. All of the nurses are taking care of the same patient. So, they need to know or continued doing the procedure that had been done by the other nurse and assist the patient whenever they need help. So, a very good social group interactions or great teamwork between the nurses are also so much important and necessary in the nursing practice.
Besides, in a modern day nowadays social science also exposed us about social structure basically the patterns of social arrangement in society or socioeconomics stratification. Earlier, I have mention that in nursing practice we also have to know our patients socioeconomics background. But regardless of that, whether they a coming from an upper class or lower class society, we as nurses should not take count of that when providing the health care services.
Social science teaches us about social structure or socioeconomics stratification to show or exposed us to the different of social arrangement in our society whether they are classified in upper class society, middle class society and lower class society. But this is why social science is relevant in nursing practice because knowing those teaches us to treat all of the patient evenly. Even the disease does not taking count of whose the person they would attack so why would us, the nurses that could even think.
Last but not least, social science reveals us about social pathology in nursing. Social pathology is a term used to describe social factors such as poverty, old age or crime that happens in society CITATION Buc07 l 1033 (Buchs, 2007). As we know, there are lot of violent crime that happened to the people, families and communities. As nowadays, a lot of patients got admitted to the hospital because of the crime that had been done to them.
A lot of them have their own social problem. This is where we as nurses need to give support because nurses not only known to give health care services but also act as an emotional support. The patient’s privacy or personal life should have been kept secret within the nurse herself or himself.
Patient sometimes would willing to share their problem with the nurses regarding their financial, family or personal problem. This is where the nurses should take responsibility for the things they believed us with. Especially for the patients who have those social problems or have been going through the worst crimes such as murdered, raped or family violence.
As conclusion, the studies of social science is so much relevant with the nursing practices and profession in terms of giving care, related to the human social behavior, social interaction, social stratification and social pathology. Social science is important as it exposed and teach us more on how to be a better nurse and on how to give a full commitment in this profession by understanding other people’s aspect of life. We should take this opportunity to know better about the society through the studies of social science.
There are a lot of research had been done about the studies of social science where we could find at anytime, anywhere and it also even being teach in nurses course at the universities. Basically to say it is like an alternative way where we can easily understand about things that happened between the social beings.
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