Applied anthropology
October 14, 2003
Medical anthropology and applied
approaches in health
What is health
 Includes approaches to
 From large scale to small scaleInfectious
disease
 From chronic disease to infectious disease
 Environmental degradation
 Stress
 AIDS and malaria
 Tuberculosis
 Dehyrdration
Four categories of global
health problems
 ONE: Specific diseases
 AIDS or tuberculosis
 Ebola, hantavirus, SARS
 TWO: Socioeconomic conditions that
threaten overall health
 Social inequality and low levels of education
 THREE: Human-made or lifestyle diseases
 Diabetes, obesity
 Effects of migration
 FOUR: environmental problems
 Urban growth as a factor in global health
 From Margaret Gwynne
International health
 Health-development link
 National health profile
 Summary of the kinds and rates of sickness and
death
 Primary health care (PHC)
 Health services as public good or merit goods
(clean air versus public health ed)
 Community participation and sustainability
James Beebe on RAP
 Basic concepts that are in use
 Systems perspective
 Triangulation
 Iterative data collection and analysis
 Ethnography as a method
 An omnibus strategy
Other methods
 Focus groups
 Nominal groups and delphi groups
 Surveys and questionnaires
 Types of questions
 Open-ended vs. structured
 Sampling
 Pretesting and evaluation
 Social indicators
 RAP
 PAR
Other methods
 Needs assessments
 Social impact assessment
 Social network analysis
 Patterned associations
 The new ethnography
 Mapping semantic domains