CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN ILLNESS REPRESENTATION

描述（改编自申请人的摘要）： 本申请是一个比较研究的认知表征的 医学上无法解释的疾病在两个不同的文化群体：一个社区 传统的第一代南亚妇女和一群欧洲妇女， 美国女人经过多年的人类学跨文化研究， 心理学和精神病学发现， 跨文化的行为，特别是在精神卫生保健等领域， 在初级保健机构的使用和症状表现，很少是 了解内部文化差异的方式 疾病的表征可能产生这些观察到的行为差异。 根据疾病简介、健康史和症状检查表数据， 本研究旨在探讨一系列相互关联的研究问题 关于西方化的， 有心理意识的人和传统的人， 等级森严的家庭社会该研究采用了一种认知模型， Leventhal和他的同事开发的疾病表征， 详细的系统性差异，如症状归因，症状 显著性，慢性化的看法，管理策略，和层模式 转诊。这项研究是一项试点研究，将有助于 制定健康史和小插曲反应数据的编码方案， 产生关于表征中相关文化差异的假设， 稍后将在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.