A single status may have multiple roles attached to it, constituting a role set. Consider

the status of a patient in a hospital. The status involves the sick role; another role as the peer of other patients; still another role as the "appreciative" receiver of the gifts and attention of friends and family members; one role as a consumer of newspapers, magazines and other small items purchased from a hospital attendant; and a role as acquaintance of a number of friendly hospital personnel. Or consider your status as a family member. Your status includes a variety of roles, for example, parent and child, uncle, spouse, and cousin. Clearly, a role does not exist in a social vacuum; it is a bundle of activities that are connected with the activities of other people. For this reason there can be no professors without students, no husbands without wives, no whites without nonwhites, and no lawyers without clients.

Roles affect us as sets of norms that define our duties the actions others can legitimately insist that we perform, and our fight the actions we can legitimately insist that others perform. Every role has at least one reciprocal role attached to it; the fights of one role are the duties of the other role. As we have noted, we have a social niche for the sick. Sick people have fights our society says they do not have to function in usual ways until they get well. But sick people also have the duty to get well and "not enjoy themselves too much." The sick role also entails an appeal to another party the physician. The physician must perceive the patient as trying to get well this is the physician’s right and the patient’s duty. And the patient must see the doctor as sincere the patient’s fight and the physician’s duty. It should come as no surprise that the quality of medical care falters when patient and physician role expectations break down.

One way that people are linked in groups is through networks of reciprocal roles. Role relationships tie us to one another because the rights of one end of the relationship are the duties of the other. People experience these stable relationships as social structure a hospital, a college, a family, a gang, an army, and so on.

If your are a patient, you take on all the following roles EXCEPT the role as______.

A．a friend of your fellow patients

B．a staff member of the hospital

C．the receiver of the treatment

D．a buyer of medicines