When Culture Impacts Health

by Banwell; Ulijaszek; Dixon

• ISBN13: 9780124159211
• ISBN10: 0124159214
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-02-20
• Publisher: Elsevier Science

Summary

Bringing the hard-to-quantify aspects of lived experience to analysis, and emphasizing what might be lost in interventions if cultural insights are absent, this book uses regional case studies from Malaysia, New Guinea, Indonesia and Peru among other Asian and Pacific regions to provide examples of the relationship between economic, political, social and other cultural norms of behaviour that can then be applied worldwide, or provide a starting point for program development. When Culture Impacts Health provides conceptual and practical insight into understanding and successfully altering cultural influences to address public health epidemics including Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, smoking, and alcohol abuse among others. For example, it presents the socio-cultural impact of socially structured wealth and how that understanding bears on data from a longitudinal study to propose which New Zealand child sub-populations will be at risk of poor health in their adult years. Discusses global application of case descriptions Demonstrates how a cultural epidemiology approach enriches and informs our understanding of intractable public health problems Covers methods and measurements of cultural epidemiology as well as actual research results Case studies include both medical anthropology and cultural epidemiology perspectives