The third characteristic of culture is that there are certain components or patterns present in every culture, regardless of how “primitive” or “advanced” it may be. Understanding these can help you understand yourself, you patient, and the health care system in which you work.
A Communication System, which may include only the language itself or the complexities of mass media, computers, and satellities, is the basis for interaction and cohesion between persons and a vehicle for the transmission and preservation of culture. In addition to vocabulary and word taboos, there are gestures, facial expressions, and voice qualities-intonation, rhythm, speed, pronunciation-that vary among families or groups within a culture and carry specific meanings. Since 100 million Americans nightly watch television, it has become the most powerful cultural communication force in the United States today. Television could be used more effectively for mass health teaching, just as it is used now for mass advertising.
Methods and Objects Are Used by a Culture to Provide for Physical Welfare. Methods include getting food; establishing personal care habits; making, using, saving, and improving tools; and manufacturing. Objects include instruments and machines used to change land terrain for farming, home building, or industrialization, and equipment used to diagnose and test disease.
Means or Techniques of Travel and Transportation of Goods and Services are particularized to a culture. Whether these are walking, use of dog or horse, or a complex system of cars, trucks, railways, and airplanes, they will affect the person`s ability to obtain health care, among other services and goods.
Exchange of Goods and Services may occur through barter, trade, commerce, involve occupational roles, and affect work and payment in a health care system.
Forms of Property, real estate and personal, are defined by the culture in terms of their necessity and worth. Respecting the person`s property in the hospital or home shows that you respect him personally.
Sexual and Family Patterns, which may vary considerably from culture to culture, affect how you care for and teach the person. Such patterns include wedding ceremonies, divorce proceedings, forms of kinships, guardianship roles, inheritance rights, the family`s division of labor, and roles assigned men, women, and children.
Societal Controls and the Institution of Government include mores, morally binding attitudes, and customs, long-established practices having the force of unwritten law. Other controls include public or group opinion, laws, political offices and the organization of government, the regulation of time, and institutionalized forms of conflict within the society or between tribes, or nations, such as war. These factors all influence the health care system in which you work. Increasingly, the nurse must become familiar with the political system and skilled in using it for improving health care.
Artistic Expression through architecture, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and dance is universal, although what is considered art by one culture may not be so considered by another. Knowledge of these factors can be useful in therapy and rehabilitation.
Recreational and Leisure-Time Interests and Activities, as defined by each cultural group, are essential for health and must be considered in the nursing history and in medical diagnosis.
Religious and Magical Ideas and Practices exist in the form of various beliefs, taboos, ethical codes, rituals, mythology, phylosophy, or organized institution of the church, and serve to guide the behavior of a cultural group during health and illness.
Knowledge Basic to Survival and Expansion of the Group is always present. In civilized or “advanced” societies, the development of science, systematized knowledge based on observation, study, and experimentation, is basic to technological innovation and improving material living standards. In modern Western cultures, science is highly valued as a basis for health care. Medical science influences people biologically and socially.
Cultural Structuring of Basic Human Patterns includes rules for competition, conflict, cooperation, collaboration, and games. Also, the intimate habits of daily life, both personally and in groups, the manner in which one`s house and body are perceived, and the many “taken-for-granted” activities between people are basically structured.
All the foregoing components and patterns influence and are influenced by climate, natural resources, geography, sanitation facilities, diet, group biological and genetic factors, and disease conditions and health practices.
References :
Ogburn, William, and M. Nimkoff, Sociology (2nd ed.). Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950.
Young, Kimball, Social Psychology (2nd ed.). New York: F. S. Crofts and Company, 1944.
Bossard, J., and E. Boll, The Sociology of Child Development (4th ed.). New York : Harper & Row, Publisher, 1966.
Johnson, Nichols, “The Careening of America”, in Moral Values in Contemporary Society. St. Louis, Mo.: Webster College, 1975.
Murray, RB and Zentner JP., Nursing Concepts for Health Promotion, Second Edtion, Prentice-Hall, Inc, Englewood Cliffs, N.J, 1979.
