SOMATIZATION, SOCIAL SUPPORT, AND SEMANTICS IN CHINATOWN

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This project is an anthropological approach to (1) the study of the role of lack of social support in the dynamics and processes of somatization among the new Chinese immigrants in New York's Chinatown, with a consequent goal of suggesting ways of acculturation that provide new sources of social support, and (2) the study of Chinese illness terminology and other components of their communicational network used for the interactional expression of distress, the translation of such means into Western models for accurately diagnosing whether somatization is at issue, and, in general, ways of helping Western-trained health professionals understand communication with their Chinese patients. A qualitative method is applied to the cultural and linguistic contextualization of how the Chinese manage affect, how they cope with stress, their family and social relations, the community and its supportive systems, and the Chinese conceptual terminology for communicating about illness and healing in all these contexts. Activities include indepth ethnographic investigation, participant observation, and interviewing in informal home visits. The sample includes families selected at random, the personnel of social and medical agencies, churches and temples, and community leaders. Part of the sample consists of key respondents identified as somatizers and the members of their families. Questionnaires will be formulated and administered probing the cultural and personal meanings of illness and its vocabulary from the perspectives of affective, connotative, and denotative semantics. Although the research is strictly qualitative, an overall goal is to identify the culturally significant variables that will establish the reliability of quantitative research beyond this project.