Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Ethnographic Investigation of Postnatal Depression in Sociocultural Context

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Case Western Reserve University doctoral candidate Sarah E. Rubin, with the guidance of Dr. Eileen Anderson-Fye, will undertake research on the cross-cultural relevance of disease categories. Over the past three decades, prevalence studies, diagnostic instruments, and treatment programs have been exported across the globe to diagnose and treat conditions without a complete understanding of whether these diagnostic concepts retain meaning and explanatory power in contexts outside of the Western locales where they were created and codified. The specific focus of Rubin's research will be postnatal depression, a diagnostic category that may or may not be salient in every cultural or economic context. She will investigate postnatal depression diagnoses in a poor, urban community near Cape Town, South Africa. She will address both the relevance of the diagnostic category and the local experience of motherhood by investigating the intersection of mothers' social roles and emotional experience in the postnatal period. She will explore the processes by which daily adversity influences the motherhood role and practice, perceptions of emotional distress in the postnatal period, and how the concept postnatal depression is used and understood in the clinical context. The study will combine longitudinal interviewing, direct observation, and participant observation with the administration of standardized questionnaires and cultural consensus modeling.This research is important because it will contribute to our understanding of the cultural construction of motherhood and mothering; to our understanding of the global burden of mental illness on women, specifically as it is affected by social roles such as motherhood and chronic adversity; to theories of how social role, emotion, and social context are iteratively constructed; and to our understanding of the processes and consequences of exporting Western diagnostic concepts to other cultures and communities. This research will also support the education and training of a social scientist.