METHODOLOGICAL MATRIX FOR SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF SOCIAL WELL-BEING OF THE PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL COMMUNITY DURING A COMPLEX EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SITUATION

Abstract

The study examines the phenomenon of social well-being in modern sociology. The purpose of the study is to reassess the subject boundaries and methodological problems of sociological knowledge of the social well-being of the medical community as a special professional group during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novelty of the study is expressed in the definition of internal and external scientific factors that distinguish the methodology of sociological knowledge of social well-being of the professional medical community from psychological and other social and humanitarian research. The study consists of three main parts. The first part reveals the main approaches to the scientific definition of the concept of “social wellbeing”. The second part analyzes the current research practices related to the definition of criteria for social well-being in the field of the professional activity of the medical community. In the third part, an integrative methodological construct is proposed for a sociological study of the social well-being of representatives of the medical community in a difficult epidemiological situation. The possibility of integrating objectivist and subjectivist methodological projections for a better sociological understanding of the essential characteristics of social well-being of medical workers in the context of the transformation of health care as a social institution against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic is argued. Social well-being is the object of research in social philosophy, economics, law, psychology, and other sciences, each of which, through a special methodology and methodological tools, studies its section of relations in the field of health care. Sociology, in contrast to other scientific systems, offers a wider set of cognitive methods that make it possible to study mechanisms of the formation of social well-being of the professional medical community at the micro and macrolevels. The authors conclude that there is a tendency to overcome the cognitive onesidedness of various methodological approaches, as well as macro and microsociology, in an attempt to create a sociological concept of the middle level, taking into account the models of social adaptation of physicians to transformational processes in the health care sector.