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The paper deals with the organizational context of medical practice, help-seeking, and illness behavior in a manner which attempts to show their relevance to more extensive sociological issues. In the first part of the paper, both the advantages and costs of bureaucratization of medical practice are discussed in relation to changes in society itself. The second part of the paper deals with the strategy for developing a social psychological help-seeking model. Although the entire paper attempts to identify strategic areas for research in medical sociology, the third part of the paper is more specifically directed to needed areas in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents various abstracts related to the field of human health and behavior. The first one is "Sociological Aspects of Aging," by Howard E. Jensen. The author stresses the disparate, though complimentary, biological and sociological problems of aging. The aging of an individual, as a sociocultural phenomenon, is defined not by physical deterioration or by time but by the value system of his society. The author points out that the simplest part of the sociological problem of aging is to ascertain the objectively determinable physical needs of the aged and to provide for them. The next abstract is "The Sentence Completion Test As a Predictor of Continuation in Psychotherapy," by E. Wesley Hiler. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the Michigan Sentence Completion Test as a predictor of a patient's prematurely terminating therapy. Another abstract is "Decision-Making in a Mental Hospital: Real, Perceived, and Ideal," by Mark Lefton, Simon Dinitz and Benjamin Pasamanick. This paper attempts to examine the decision-making process in a small, institute type of psychiatric hospital in terms of differences in real, perceived and ideal influence patterns of 53 mental health specialists.