Dissertation Research: Child Illness in Rural Laos: CulturalPerceptions, Caregiver Response and Implications for Child Survival

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This project supports the dissertation research of an anthropology student from the University of Arizona. The student will study infant and child illness in Laos, one of the least developed countries in the world. The research will use ethnographic methods to document the socio-cultural and economic contexts in which caregivers in rural Laos distinguish, categorize, diagnose, and select treatments for childhood illnesses, paying careful attention to seasonal variation. In addition the student will study how informal and formal health providers, including vendors, pharmacists, lay healers and public health workers interpret the illness terms and categories presented by caregivers. Methods include participant-observation in a Laotian rural village over 14 months including a household survey, semi-structured as well as structured interviews with small samples of caregivers, additional interviews with a random sample of 50 caregivers, a formal study of drug stores and village market shops selling medicine and providing advice, and interviews with users of public and private clinics and hospitals.At present there are almost no qualitative studies of Laotian health behavior. This project will advance our understanding of how poor people in an underdeveloped society seek out and interpret the information available to them to treat illness in young children. This new knowledge will be valuable to health officials in similar less-developed societies in preparing programs to provide care. The project will also advance our understanding of this important region of the world.