Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Supplementary Feeding and the Perception of Benefits in Malaysian Borneo

南佛罗里达大学的研究生，伊丽莎白埃利奥特库珀，在琳达博士的监督下工作。怀特福德将对马来西亚令人费解的补充喂养计划的流行进行研究。该计划在人体测量改善方面没有表现出明确的疗效，这是标准的结果测量。尽管如此，该计划仍在继续，而且显然仍然很受欢迎，这引发了分析师应该如何概念化和衡量任何发展干预的好处的问题。库珀将把她的研究重点放在马来西亚婆罗洲的两个沿海村庄，并调查除了卫生专业人员使用的文化模式外，是否存在计划福利的文化模式。她将在社区条件，食物信仰和做法的背景下这些模型。她的目标是双重的：了解相互冲突的评价标准对农村人口健康和福祉的影响;并测试一种独特的社会科学方法组合，作为更好地理论化文化信仰和实践之间复杂关系的一种方式。库珀将使用的方法包括结合营养评估（儿童人体测量和家庭食品安全），探索性访谈，自由回忆列表，堆排序任务，和参与者观察。她将通过结构化调查验证这些结果。此外，她将比较文化共识分析的结果，它着眼于文化的变异性，沿着由标准化视觉测试产生的变异性，与基本的推理统计（t检验，卡方，方差分析，MANOVA和多元回归）的结果。库珀的研究是创新的，它如何结合结构和认知研究。营养方面的现有社会研究要么侧重于与权力有关的变量（经济、物质和政治因素），要么侧重于与信仰有关的变量（心理、文化和态度因素）。 库珀的多方面的人种学方法是更全面的，考虑到家庭的经济约束和演员的权力差异以及信仰。 这项研究将有助于扩大认知方法在营养研究中的应用，并增加关于人类信仰系统中的分离如何影响人类行为和活动的社会科学理论。 本研究也将有助于研究生的教育。

University of South Florida graduate student, Elizabeth Elliott Cooper, working under the supervision of Dr. Linda M. Whiteford, will undertake research on the puzzling popularity of a supplementary feeding program in Malaysia. The program exhibits no clear efficacy in terms of anthropometric improvement, which is the standard outcome measure. Nevertheless, the program continues and, apparently, remains popular, which prompts questions of how analysts should conceptualize and measure the benefits of any development intervention. Cooper will focus her research on two coastal villages in Malaysian Borneo and investigate the possibility that there are cultural models for program benefits, other than those used by health professionals. She will contextualize these models in community conditions, food beliefs, and practices. Her goals are two-fold: to understand the implications of conflicting evaluation standards for the health and well being of rural populations; and to test a unique combination of social science methodologies as a way of better theorizing the complex relationship between cultural beliefs and practices.The methodologies Cooper will use include combining nutritional assessment (child anthropometry and household food security), exploratory interviews, free-recall listing, pile sorting tasks, and participant observation. She will validate these results with a structured survey. In addition, she will compare the results of cultural consensus analysis, which looks at cultural variability, along with variability produced by standardized visual tests, with the results of basic inferential statistics (t-tests, chi-square, ANOVA, MANOVA, and multiple regression).Cooper's research is innovative in how it combines structural and cognitive research. Existing social research in nutrition focuses on either power-related variables (economic, material and political factors) or belief-related variables (psychological, cultural and attitudinal factors). Cooper's multi-faceted ethnographic approach is more holistic, taking into account household economic constraints and actor power differentials as well as beliefs. The research will contribute to expanded use of cognitive methods in nutritional research and add to social science theory on how disjunctions in human belief systems impact human practicies and activities. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.