The Social Construction of the Scavenger about Healthy Behavior in Bengkulu

Abstract

The title of this study is “The Social Construction of The Scavenger about Healthy Behavior in Bengkulu”. The purpose of this research are to analyze: how the scavenger in Bengkulu construct the health behavior?, and is there any differences between the social construct of scavenger who lived in Final Disposal Site (FDS) with the scavenger who lived in slum? To analyze the social construction of scavenger about health behavior will elaborate by using Peter L. Berger’s Social Construction and Thomas Luckmann. According to Berger and Luckmann, in the process of social contract will be take place externalisation, objectification, and internalisation. Through these process will be obtained the description and comprehension about the health behavior of scavengers in Bengkulu city. In social construction, each individual tend to understand the world that they lived, worked, and socialized to develop the meaning of subjective world for their experienced. Their occupation have high risk on safety work and potentially caused injure, during do their job, they often have very low consciousness and careless about their health, so make the scavenger looklike do not have a good health behavior or opposite with the norms and health value. This condition forced them to do so, because socially they are ussually poor, homeless (mostly they live in rent house), less educated and less knowledgeable. From the environment side, how are the scavenger adapt in unhealthy environment?  And in terms of health, what will they do to make them healthy? And when they are sick, what will they do? Based on the description above, it must be very important to deeply examine about the phenomenon of health behavior through the study of social construction of the scavenger’s health behavior: a) behavioral health care has not been done in a healthy manner, b) treatment seeking behavior and health service; think economically, practically, and ignore the principles of health service, c) and on the environmental health behavior aspect, behave contradictory with health principles. The scavenger’s knowledge about health, have not been become guidance for the health behavior of the scavenger. There is no differences social construct about health behavior between the scavenger who lived in FDS with the scavenger who lived in slum.

Keywords: Social Construct, knowledge, Scavenger Community, Health Behavior