Collaborative Research: An Ethnographic Study of Local-level Policy Implementation Diversity

该奖项支持的研究着眼于国家、州和地方政策、话语和人们如何相互作用，以创造一个当地的服务选择环境。政策制定可以假定从联邦和州一级制定的目标直接转化为社区一级的执行和反应。但美国包含了非常多样化的当地背景。这项研究解决了多样性如何影响政策实施的重要问题。这项研究将由人类学家萨拉·B·霍顿(科罗拉多大学丹佛分校)和惠特尼·L·邓肯(北科罗拉多大学)进行。研究人员选择将重点放在当地对卫生保健服务可获得性的看法上，作为政策下放的案例研究。他们将对科罗拉多州两个不同地点的特定居民进行纵向比较调查，了解他们如何联系和了解慢性病医疗服务的可获得性。政策在全州是标准的，但受到不同的地方制度、历史和社会文化背景的影响。我们的目标是看看这些背景有什么不同。通过与当地诊所合作，他们将通过与当地利益相关者、患者和卫生保健人员进行访谈和参与者观察来收集数据。他们还将分析当地媒体的账户和相关文件。这项研究的结果将对政策制定者、服务提供商和服务用户具有价值。这项研究还将丰富社会科学对当代国家复杂运作的理解，以及公民身份在地方一级被具体化的不同方式。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The research supported by this award looks at how national, state, and local policies, discourses, and people interact to produce a local service choice environment. Policy development may assume a direct translation from the objectives developed at federal and state levels to implementation and response at the community level. But the United States comprises a great diversity of local contexts. This research addresses the important question of how that diversity affects policy implementation.The research will be conducted by anthropologists Sarah B. Horton (University of Colorado at Denver) and Whitney L. Duncan (University of Northern Colorado). The researchers have chosen to focus on local perceptions of health care service availability as a case study of policy devolution. They will undertake a comparative, longitudinal investigation of how specific residents in two different sites in Colorado, one urban and one rural, connect with and understand the availability of health care services for chronic diseases. Policies are standard across the state but are mediated by different local institutional, historical, and sociocultural contexts. The goal is to see what difference those contexts make. Working cooperatively with local clinics, they will collect data through interviews and participant observation with local stakeholders, patients, and health care staff. They will also analyze local media accounts and relevant documents. Findings from this research will be valuable for policy makers, service providers, and service users. The research will also enrich social scientific understanding of the complex functioning of the contemporary state and the different ways in which citizenship is made concrete at the local level.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.