smoking essays

smoking essays Cigarette smoking is still the most important preventable cause of premature death in Australia. It has been found that the use of tabacco has resulted in a loss of more than 18,000 lives in Australia each year, while costing the Australian community more than $12.7 billion per annum, which in annual economic costs in terms of lost years of life, loss of income and medical and related costs, were estimated to be at around two percent of the gross national product . Thus, reducing the prevalence of smoking rightly remains a high priority on Australia's public health agenda. In this paper, I will describe the way in which a structural functionalist approach is implicit in the area of health promotion programmes on smoke free environments. Aaron Antonovsky proposed that health is created where people live, love, learn, work and play. This ultimately results to a disproportionately prevalent use of tobacco, where it is found that smoking prevalence is inversely related to education and socioeconomic status. This complements the structuralist theory, which assumes that, what people believe and how individuals behave, is mediated through social institutions. Structural functionalists argue that social institutions like the family, the education system and health care play a role in socializing people. Social roles, derived through consensus, regulate social action, including how we behave with respect to health promotion. Parsons believe that there exists interpersonal and inter-institutional ties within the society. These ties have a compelling effect on the individual to perform and adopt a certain action. Every member of the society has his or her own obligations and responsibility to the society. There exists a social pressure on him for which he cannot disregard his roles and responsibilities to the society and his own family as well. This explains the behavior change by an individuals motivation to comply with those o...