Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн

190 страница из 242

When prior theory and evidence warrant specific expectations, confirmatory research questions are appropriate. One distinctive feature of confirmatory research in medical anthropology is that it often builds on an exploratory phase in the same study. We see that progression in Reese’s work. Toward the end of her fieldwork, Reese and a community collaborator conducted a survey designed to place the ethnographic findings in context. Part of the purpose was strategic: “The hope was that this data would put some numbers behind the anecdotal experiences that we all knew were true but were not always heard by those in power” (p. 15). But there is also an implicit confirmatory question: To what extent do the stories of Mr. Johnson and others characterize a broader geographic and social context?

Similarly, in their exploratory work, Chavez et al. (1995) found that Latinas’ beliefs about cervical and breast cancer differed from biomedical models more than Anglo women’s beliefs did. “We were left wondering,” they later wrote (Chavez et al. 2001, p. 1114), “to what extent these patterns of belief were associated with behavior, specifically the use of Pap exams, a screening test for cervical cancer. In other words, to what degree do cultural beliefs matter in the use of medical services?” Chavez et al. (2001) combined ethnographic interviews and survey research to address this question and found that, under certain circumstances, beliefs matter a lot.