Dissertation Research: Medical Treatment Decision-Making of Tanzanian Families

9904347Brown / Kamat这个项目支持Emory大学人类学学生的论文研究，研究坦桑尼亚达累斯萨拉姆市居民的医疗决策参数。政府最近取消了长期以来对私人医疗的反感，该市（主要是穷人）居民可获得的医疗保健选择的数量和多样性正在急剧增加。学生将测试关于疾病严重程度和治疗机构选择之间关系的假设（疾病越严重，患者越有可能寻求私人治疗，尽管费用昂贵）；在城市居住的时间长短将预测治疗决策的个体化与群体性（一个城市居民住得越近，其决策就越以群体为导向）；而且，疾病的严重程度将与医疗决策的风格相关（病情更严重的患者将寻求更广泛的团体咨询，以寻求治疗）。方法包括参与观察、半结构化家庭访谈、疾病叙述、生活史和对少数焦点家庭的扩展案例研究。该项目将促进我们对相对未受教育的贫困城市居民如何应对医疗机会变化的理解。随着世界上越来越多的国家从计划经济转向新自由主义的资本主义市场经济，消费者选择的这些变化将更加普遍，这种丰富的案例研究将有助于理解其他类似背景下的行为。此外，该项目还支持培训一名年轻的社会科学家，并提高我们对世界这一重要领域的认识。

9904347Brown / Kamat This project supports the dissertation research of an anthropology student from Emory University studying the parameters of medical treatment decision making by residents of the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The government has recently withdrawn its long-standing antipathy to private medical treatment, and the city is experiencing a dramatic increase in the number and diversity of health care options available to its (mainly poor) residents. The student will test hypotheses concerning the relation of illness severity and choice of treatment facility (the more severe the illness, the more likely the patient will be to seek private, albeit expensive treatment); that length of residence in the city will predict the individualized versus group nature of treatment decision-making (the more recent an urban resident, the more group-oriented the decision-making); and that illness severity will correlate with the style of medical decision-making (more severely ill patients will seek wider group consultation in a search for treatment). Methods include participant observation, semi-structured household interviews, illness narratives, life histories and extended case studies of a small number of focal families, This project will advance our understanding of how relatively uneducated, poor urban residents react to changes in medical treatment opportunities. As more countries in the world convert from a command economy to a neo-liberal capitalist market economy, these sorts of changes in consumer choice will be more prevalent, and this sort of rich case study will be useful in understanding behavior in other similar contexts. In addition the project supports the training of a young social scientist, and advances our knowledge of this important area of the world.