Medical Decision Making Among the Kom of Cameroon: The Effect of Consensus on the Process of Choice

本项目涉及一名学生的论文研究， 喀麦隆农村地区的文化人类学。 研究 将调查人们对疾病的看法， 治疗方法及其治疗评价 结果，影响他们的健康寻求行为。 大多数研究 研究孤立的信念如何与 与治疗行为;相反，该项目分析了 医疗决策过程。 该项目将研究社会 网络和群体共识使用人种志，正式和 非正式访谈和相对较新的分析程序， 认知人类学，研究群体对 分类和评价影响行为。 这项研究很重要，因为在所有社会中， 有不同的疾病和治疗的“流行模式”， 有时支持，但往往与科学推导的冲突， 治疗制度。 理解文化的重要性 在这种情况下，医疗决策的因素将提前 我们的理论知识，关于遵守和健康寻求 一般的行为。

This project involves the dissertation research of a student in cultural anthropology in a rural area of Cameroon. The research will investigate how people's perceptions of illnesses and treatment alternatives, and their evaluations of treatment results, influence their health-seeking behavior. Most studies of health-seeking behavior examine how isolated beliefs correlate with treatment behavior; in contrast this project analyzes the medical decision-making process. The project will examine social networks and group consensus using ethnography, formal and informal interviews, and relatively new analytical procedures in cognitive anthropology to study how group agreement on categorizations and evaluations influence behavior. This research is important because lay people in all societies have divergent "popular models" of illness and treatment, which sometimes support but often conflict with scientifically-derived treatment regimes. Understanding the importance of cultural factors in medical decision making in this one case will advance our theoretical knowledge about compliance and health seeking behavior in general.