Alternative Pathways to Well-Being

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Narratives of personal change often include accounts of spiritual experiences. The research supported by this award will investigate if and how these experiences actually affect people's lives going forward. Anthropologists have studied how cultural beliefs and practices produce spiritual experiences but less is known about the long-term effects of the experiences that informants describe. Do these experiences matter, and if so, how? Answering this question is important for understanding how and why people make major changes in their lives. These changes could include mundane choices of school or career, or weighty choices such as whether to stop using drugs or join a terrorist organization. Understanding the full range of factors involved in personal change is critical for developing interventions, counseling programs, and policies that will help Americans to live healthy, safe, and productive lives. University of Virginia anthropologist, Dr. China Scherz, and her team will investigate this question by studying the effects of spiritual experience in the lives of people attempting to make a major life change. Building on two years of preliminary research, they have chosen to focus the final phase of their study on recovery from alcohol addiction. The research will be conducted in Uganda because spiritual experiences are more commonly foregrounded in Ugandan recovery narratives due to the limited options for biomedically based addiction treatment. Over the course of a year, the researchers will will gather data with qualitative ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, and mapping exercises. They will follow 25-30 people who have tried to stop drinking, focusing on the effects of spiritual experiences in their lives over time. Results of this research provide a model for including spiritual experiences in social scientific understandings of life transformation, which will be generalizable to many United States populations. The study will also provide the first extended analysis of contemporary modes of conceptualizing and addressing problem-drinking in an African context. Poverty, access to schooling, and diseases including HIV, tuberculosis, cancer, and other non-communicable diseases in many sub-Saharan African countries have been increasingly linked to high levels of alcohol consumption. Addressing these problems is important to U. S. interests in global health and development. This study will highlight novel and cost-effective ways to capitalize on local paradigms for addressing problems related to substance abuse and mental health. Dr. Scherz's ties with academics and policy-makers at leading national psychiatric and medical facilities in Uganda and in the United States will facilitate the dissemination of results and the translation of the study's findings into meaningful program and policy recommendations. This study will also help to develop a cohort of researchers working in this area by providing opportunities for Ugandans and U.S. undergraduates to develop their research skills and capacities through hands-on practice and mentorship.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.