DDIG: Culture, Trauma, and Health: Social Suffering in Guatemala

研究生布赖恩泰勒，在克拉伦斯博士的监督下。Gravlee将探讨社会和文化因素如何塑造危地马拉前难民社区创伤经历的健康影响，内战正式停止十年后。具体目标是：（1）整合人类学和流行病学中关于创伤体现的现有研究;（2）探索创伤经历文化模型中的文化间和文化内差异;（3）测试文化意义是否介导创伤经历与健康之间的关系。研究人员将使用定性和定量方法进行为期12个月的实地研究。在第一阶段，他将使用参与式观察和两轮民族志访谈来探索创伤经历的文化模式。第一组访谈将引出关于创伤经历的叙述以及在文化上适当的应对这些经历的方式。第二组访谈将引出结构化的民族志数据，以评估创伤和应对的文化模型的协议和文化内差异的水平。在该项目的第二阶段，研究人员将进行一项小型流行病学调查，以测试基于文化的创伤经历测量是否比传统的生物医学测量更能解释个体心理和生物健康结果的变化。该项目具有重要的理论和实践意义。从理论上讲，该项目解决了以前关于创伤经历的健康后果的生物医学和人类学研究的主要局限性。现有生物医学研究的一个局限性是，研究人员通常专注于个人，忽视了社会文化背景如何塑造心理，生物和行为过程。相比之下，以前的人类学研究，通常试图捕捉经验是如何在文化上构建的，并没有系统地将社会文化背景与个人健康结果联系起来。这项研究通过测试创伤经历的共同结构如何与个人幸福感相关，弥合了生物医学和人类学研究之间的差距。在实践中，这项研究将有助于新的知识，社会和文化对人口健康的影响，可能会告知未来的干预措施，以减少创伤经历的受害者健康状况不佳的负担。

Graduate student Brian Tyler, under the supervision of Dr. Clarence C. Gravlee, will explore how social and cultural factors shape the health effects of traumatic experience in a former refugee community in Guatemala, a decade after the formal cessation of civil war. The specific goals are (1) to integrate existing research in anthropology and epidemiology on the embodiment of trauma; (2) to explore inter- and intra-cultural variation in cultural models of traumatic experience; and (3) to test whether cultural meaning mediates the relationship between traumatic experience and health. The researcher will conduct 12 months of field research using qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first phase, he will use participant observation and two rounds of ethnographic interviews to explore cultural models of traumatic experience. The first set of interviews will elicit narratives about traumatic experiences and culturally appropriate ways of coping with these experiences. The second set of interviews will elicit structured ethnographic data to assess the level of agreement and intra-cultural variation in cultural models of trauma and coping. In the second phase of the project, the researcher will conduct a small epidemiologic survey to test whether culturally-grounded measures of traumatic experiences explain more variation in individual mental and biological health outcomes than do conventional biomedical measures. The project is significant for both theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretically, the project addresses key limitations of previous biomedical and anthropological research on the health consequences of traumatic experiences. One limitation of existing biomedical research is that researchers typically focus on the individual and neglect how sociocultural context shapes mental, biological, and behavioral processes. By contrast, previous anthropological research, which typically seeks to capture how experience is culturally constructed, has not systematically connected sociocultural context back to individual health outcomes. This study bridges the gap between biomedical and anthropological research by testing how shared constructions of traumatic experience relate to individual well-being. In practical terms, this study will contribute new knowledge about the social and cultural influences on population health that may inform future interventions to reduce the burden of poor health among victims of traumatic experiences.