CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN ILLNESS REPRESENTATION

描述(改编自申请人摘要)：中描述的项目 这一应用是对认知表征的对比研究 跨越两个不同文化群体的医学上无法解释的疾病：一个社区 由传统的第一代南亚女性和一群欧洲人组成 美国女性。尽管人类学进行了多年的跨文化研究， 心理学和精神病学在疾病中发现了广泛的差异 跨文化的行为，特别是在精神卫生保健等领域 在初级保健环境中的利用率和症状表现，很少是 理解内部文化差异的方式 疾病的表现可能会产生这些观察到的行为差异。 根据疾病间歇期、健康史和症状清单数据， 研究旨在调查一系列相互关联的研究问题。 关于西方人在疾病表现上的差异， 有心理头脑的人和来自传统的， 等级森严、家族主义的社会。这项研究利用了一个认知模型 莱文塔尔和他的同事开发的疾病表示法 症状归因、症状等方面的详细系统差异 突出度、慢性病认知、管理策略和外行模式 转介。这项研究被构想为一项先导性研究，将有助于 制定健康史和活动反应数据的编码方案，并 生成关于相关文化差异的表征假设 这将在稍后的更大规模的研究中进行测试。

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from the Applicant's Abstract): The project described in this application is a comparative study of the cognitive representation of medically unexplained illness across two disparate cultural groups: a community of traditional, first generation, South Asian women, and a group of European American women. Though many years of cross cultural research in anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry have found wide-spread differences in illness behavior across cultures, particularly in areas such as mental health care utilization and symptom presentation in primary care settings, very little is understood of the ways in which cultural differences in the internal representations of illness may generate these observed behavioral differences. Drawing on illness vignette, health history, and symptom checklist data, the study is designed to investigate a series of interrelated research questions about differences in illness representation between westernized, psychologically minded individuals and individuals from traditional, hierarchical, familistic societies. The study utilizes a cognitive model of illness representation developed by Leventhal and his colleagues to uncover detailed systematic differences in areas such as symptom attribution, symptom salience, perceptions of chronicity, management strategies, and patterns of lay referral. The study is conceptualized as a pilot study which will serve to develop a coding scheme for the health history and vignette response data and to generate hypotheses about pertinent cultural differences in representation which will be tested later on in a larger scale study.