Sociology's contribution to understanding the consequences of medical innovations.

摘要

The recent film The Social Network featured as its tagline: "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies." Likewise, you don't get to screen 4 million newborns without getting some critical scrutiny. Many sociologists take this as a vital part of our job description: to consider whether there are unanticipated or underappreciated downsides to major social and policy changes. Such work represents a key contribution of the profession to society, and a longstanding part of it is understanding whether institutional criteria for evaluating policies fully reflect the actual, lived experiences of all individuals affected by them, especially those individuals whose voices might otherwise be easiest to ignore. Primary strengths of ethnographic sociology are its capacity to articulate patterns in the lived experience of those it studies and the latitude investigators have to "follow" phenomena to unanticipated and overlooked aspects.