Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Supplementary Feeding and the Perception of Benefits in Malaysian Borneo

南佛罗里达大学的研究生伊丽莎白·埃利奥特·库珀在琳达·M·怀特福德博士的指导下，将对马来西亚一项补充喂养计划令人费解的受欢迎程度进行研究。该计划在人体测量改善方面没有表现出明显的效果，这是标准的结果衡量标准。尽管如此，该项目仍在继续，而且显然仍然很受欢迎，这引发了一些问题，即分析师应该如何概念化和衡量任何开发干预的好处。库珀将把她的研究重点放在马来西亚婆罗洲的两个沿海村庄，并调查除了卫生专业人员使用的模式外，是否存在其他文化模式来实现项目福利。她将把这些模式与社区条件、饮食信仰和实践联系起来。她的目标有两个：了解相互冲突的评估标准对农村人口健康和福祉的影响；测试社会科学方法的独特组合，以更好地对文化信仰和实践之间的复杂关系进行理论分析。库珀将使用的方法包括结合营养评估(儿童人体测量和家庭食品安全)、探索性访谈、自由回忆清单、堆积分类任务和参与者观察。她将通过一项结构化调查来验证这些结果。此外，她还将比较文化共识分析的结果，该分析着眼于文化变异性，以及标准化视觉测试产生的变异性，并将其与基本推理统计的结果(t检验、卡方检验、方差分析、马诺瓦和多元回归)进行比较。库珀的研究在如何结合结构研究和认知研究方面具有创新性。现有的社会营养研究要么关注与权力相关的变量(经济、物质和政治因素)，要么关注与信仰相关的变量(心理、文化和态度因素)。库珀的多方面人种学方法更加全面，考虑到了家庭经济限制和演员权力差异以及信仰。这项研究将有助于扩大认知方法在营养研究中的使用，并增加关于人类信念系统中的分离如何影响人类实践和活动的社会科学理论。这项研究也将有助于研究生的教育。

University of South Florida graduate student, Elizabeth Elliott Cooper, working under the supervision of Dr. Linda M. Whiteford, will undertake research on the puzzling popularity of a supplementary feeding program in Malaysia. The program exhibits no clear efficacy in terms of anthropometric improvement, which is the standard outcome measure. Nevertheless, the program continues and, apparently, remains popular, which prompts questions of how analysts should conceptualize and measure the benefits of any development intervention. Cooper will focus her research on two coastal villages in Malaysian Borneo and investigate the possibility that there are cultural models for program benefits, other than those used by health professionals. She will contextualize these models in community conditions, food beliefs, and practices. Her goals are two-fold: to understand the implications of conflicting evaluation standards for the health and well being of rural populations; and to test a unique combination of social science methodologies as a way of better theorizing the complex relationship between cultural beliefs and practices.The methodologies Cooper will use include combining nutritional assessment (child anthropometry and household food security), exploratory interviews, free-recall listing, pile sorting tasks, and participant observation. She will validate these results with a structured survey. In addition, she will compare the results of cultural consensus analysis, which looks at cultural variability, along with variability produced by standardized visual tests, with the results of basic inferential statistics (t-tests, chi-square, ANOVA, MANOVA, and multiple regression).Cooper's research is innovative in how it combines structural and cognitive research. Existing social research in nutrition focuses on either power-related variables (economic, material and political factors) or belief-related variables (psychological, cultural and attitudinal factors). Cooper's multi-faceted ethnographic approach is more holistic, taking into account household economic constraints and actor power differentials as well as beliefs. The research will contribute to expanded use of cognitive methods in nutritional research and add to social science theory on how disjunctions in human belief systems impact human practicies and activities. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.