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ssss1 Steps in analyzing explanatory models of illness, based on Yoder (1995) and Ryan et al. (2000).

In the graph in Figure 4.5, each solid circle represents a symptom; the other symbols represent individual illness descriptions by groups of women. The closer any two points appear together, the more strongly they are associated with each other. Thus, sunken palate and tongue clacking were often mentioned together, and both were associated with descriptions of lukunga. “Frequent stools” are associated with kilondo ntumbo and kasumbi, but women were more likely to mention “very frequent stools” in descriptions of kuhara and buse. The large ovals are 95% confidence intervals that reflect how much the groups of women agreed with one another about which symptoms go with which illnesses.

This analysis is no substitute for Yoder’s original ethnography, of course. But it does add new insight about the level of intracultural variation, the coherence and boundaries of illness categories, and the amount of overlap in symptoms associated with different illnesses. Sibley et al. (2007) recently used the same approach to analyze women’s descriptions of postpartum health problems in Bangladesh. In both cases, the transformation of words into numbers, numbers into pictures, and pictures back into words reminds us of how counterproductive it is to divvy research methods into either qualitative or quantitative.