Abstract

The analysis presented in this article does not aim to offer a comprehensive overview of the issues that health pedagogy should address. Its purpose was solely to demonstrate the potential application of social role theory in organizing the social issues of health and illness, which should be the subject of research within health pedagogy. This includes developing effective ways to support individuals and groups through education in maintaining health and overcoming the consequences of illness—whether one's own or that of a loved one. As J. H. Turner writes, “role theory is potentially useful because it concerns the complex interrelations of expectations derived from the social structure, their influence through the self, and individuals’ role-playing abilities [...].” He also believes that role performance is among the most observable phenomena, which is particularly important for the methodology of empirical research. This usefulness of social role theory should be recognized and utilized to a greater extent in health pedagogy research than it has been so far. Doing so would allow for a deeper understanding of the full range of connections between individuals facing health-related issues and the social structure. One of the earlier and most universal attempts to create a model linking health and illness issues with human social functioning is based on the theory of social roles. The concept of a social role, although it belongs to the fundamental concepts of the social sciences—especially sociology—is very difficult to define unambiguously and, consequently, to apply in research processes. This difficulty arises from the fact that the referents of this concept must be sought in two distinct areas of social reality: the normative and the behavioral. However, the most frequently cited definitions in the literature tend to relate exclusively to one of these dimensions. For example, sociological dictionaries state that a social role is "a defined and socially determined, internally consistent set of rules and expectations regarding desirable behavior of individuals in specific situations, connected with their social positions, as well as a set of fundamental privileges, duties, and rights socially assigned to a position within a group." Another definition describes a social role as "a set of expectations concerning the behavior of a person occupying a given position in the social structure, or the totality of rights and responsibilities associated with a given social position or status." A classic figure in Polish sociology, J. Szczepański, defined a social role as "a relatively stable and internally consistent system of behaviors that are reactions to the behaviors of other people, occurring according to a more or less clearly established pattern." T. Newcomb expressed a similar view, stating that a social role is "consistent behavior of an individual within a more or less stable relationship with another person or several persons." Likewise, J. H. Turner defined a social role as "the behaviors of individual persons within social positions in relation to each other, taking into account norms and other cultural symbols."