Introduction

Hello Class! 

Nice to meet you all. I am Sophie Nathenson, your online instructor and the Director of the Population Health Management Program at Oregon Tech- Klamath Falls. 

I was raised in the midwest, mostly Nebraska. I studied psychology and Spanish at the University of Tulsa, and studied abroad in Madrid, Spain and Prague, Czech Republic. After college I moved to the Czech Republic, taught preschool, started a business, and then relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah.  In Utah I continued my education in sociology and taught at the University of Utah and Westminster College. I have worked in Klamath Falls as a medical sociologist for five years. In that time I have worked with many organizations in healthcare, government, and the non-profit sector within Oregon, and I have continued to study abroad, most recently in Denmark and Iceland. 

I love Oregon Tech for many reasons, but mostly the hands on, real world approach in which education evolves along with industry and society.  I had the opportunity to start an applied medical sociology program,  Population Health Management (PHM), and with the help of the first cohort of PHM students, started the Population Health Management Research Center (PHMRC). At the PHMRC, student researchers-in-training conduct research and make recommendations to organizations on issues related to the health of communities. 

To sociologists, community health issues are viewed in a broader scope, in which education, industries, and the physical infrastructure of cities play a part. In this course we will learn about health using a sociological perspective. We will look at trends in health by different groups compared to each other, and examine how the aspects of our communities shape our health.

I will be providing many research studies from a variety of disciplines to share with you different aspects of society as related to health. I will also use real world examples of applying this research to improve community health—mostly these will include projects that PHM majors are working on in Oregon.

In this course we will learn and apply the “sociological imagination”- as you’ll find in reading the article “The Promise” by C. W. Mills, this point of view is a “big picture” mentality.  Using the sociological imagination means envisioning humans not just as individual actors, but as a whole, examining patterns and trends in behavior.  It’s as if you start to see the “structure” of society- the way it all works together. And, if you have the opportunity to travel or learn about other cultures, you start to realize how different these structures can be. 

The next blog introduces the field of sociology, and lists the social institutions that form the organization of our societies.