Dissertation Research: Medical Treatment Decision-Making of Tanzanian Families

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9904347Brown / Kamat This project supports the dissertation research of an anthropology student from Emory University studying the parameters of medical treatment decision making by residents of the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The government has recently withdrawn its long-standing antipathy to private medical treatment, and the city is experiencing a dramatic increase in the number and diversity of health care options available to its (mainly poor) residents. The student will test hypotheses concerning the relation of illness severity and choice of treatment facility (the more severe the illness, the more likely the patient will be to seek private, albeit expensive treatment); that length of residence in the city will predict the individualized versus group nature of treatment decision-making (the more recent an urban resident, the more group-oriented the decision-making); and that illness severity will correlate with the style of medical decision-making (more severely ill patients will seek wider group consultation in a search for treatment). Methods include participant observation, semi-structured household interviews, illness narratives, life histories and extended case studies of a small number of focal families, This project will advance our understanding of how relatively uneducated, poor urban residents react to changes in medical treatment opportunities. As more countries in the world convert from a command economy to a neo-liberal capitalist market economy, these sorts of changes in consumer choice will be more prevalent, and this sort of rich case study will be useful in understanding behavior in other similar contexts. In addition the project supports the training of a young social scientist, and advances our knowledge of this important area of the world.