Sveikatos modelio ir sveikatos nelygybės santykis visuomenės vertybių kaitos požiūriu
The Nexus between the Health Model and Health Inequalities from the Perspective of the Change in Social Values

Summary/Abstract: The health inequality is not only very important issue in the societies of modernity, but it also depends on the wide spectrum of social factors. Evidently, there is a direct relationship between the dominant health model in society and health inequality. The paper combines different theoretical approaches and explains this impact of health model on health-conscious behavior. The issue of the impact of the change in the health model on health inequalities in literature is analyzed from the point of view of different sciences in general and from different perspectives of sociology in particular. Largely, the subjects of research are the worse health outcomes associated with lower positions in the hierarchies of income, education and occupational status. Publications on this topic have increased considerably, beginning with the 1980s and up to the mid-1990s. Our paper discusses how the influence of value orientations to the prevailing health model of the society could be explained by different sociological perspectives and in turn how the health models influence the health-conscious behavior of different social groups. In the paper, we present the theoretical perspectives on the conception of archihealth (Nick J. Fox), theory of human development (Ronald Inglehart) and consumer society (Zygmunt Bauman) and apply them to the analysis of the impact of the changes of value orientations on the model of health-conscious behavior and health inequalities. The interaction between dominant values and health is analyzed from the perspective of “human development theory” introduced by Inglehart and his colleagues. The theory states that modern society could be divided in two value types – materialist and postmaterialist. This conception could be used to compare not only different societies, but also different social groups (age, gender and etc.) in the same society. The materialists care less about their health and, conversely, for the postmaterialists the care about health becomes the way of life and self-expression and the part of their identity construction. Moreover, the conception of consumer society (Bauman) shows how the business commercializes the health-conscious behavior and presupposes different possibilities for individuals to care about their health.

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