Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

This chapter explores the ecology of human development, those forces in the person's environment that affect and influence development. Urie Bronfenbrenner's model of the human ecosystem guides the discussion, making connections between children in families and in communities and the larger society that surrounds them. The human ecosystem model is much like the study of the natural ecology, focusing on the interactions between subjects at various levels of the environment as they affect each other. The interaction between individual and environment forms the basis of an ecological approach to human development. This view sees the process of development as the expansion of the child's conception of the world and the child's ability to act on that world. Risks to development can come from both direct threats and the absence of opportunities for development. Sociocultural risk refers to the impoverishment in the child's world of essential experiences and relationships.

The Ecology of Human Development

www.mobilehealthmap.org 617‐442‐3200 New research shows that mobile health clinics improve health outcomes for hard to reach populations in cost‐effective and culturally competent ways . A Harvard Medical School study determined that for every dollar invested in a mobile health clinic, the US healthcare system saves $30 on average. Mobile health clinics, which offer a range of services from preventive screenings to asthma treatment, leverage their mobility to treat people in the convenience of their own communities. For example, a mobile health clinic in Baltimore, MD, has documented savings of $3,500 per child seen due to reduced asthma‐related hospitalizations. The estimated 2,000 mobile health clinics across the country are providing similarly cost‐effective access to healthcare for a wide range of populations. Many successful mobile health clinics cite their ability to foster trusting relationships. Qualitative research in such mobile health clinics has found that patients value the informal, familiar environment in a convenient location, with staff who “are easy to talk to,” and that the staff’s “marriage of professional and personal discourses” provides patients the space to disclose information themselves. A communications academic argued that mobile health clinics’ unique use of space is important in facilitating these relationships. Mobile health clinics park in the heart of the community in familiar spaces, like shopping centers or bus stations, which lend themselves to the local community atmosphere.

Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care

Background
Pain is an enormous problem globally. Estimates suggest that 20% of adults suffer from pain globally and 10% are newly diagnosed with chronic pain each year. Nevertheless, the problem of pain has primarily been regarded as a medical problem, and has been little addressed by the field of public health.

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Pain as a global public health priority.

Purpose Religion and spirituality play a role in coping with illness for many cancer patients. This study examined religiousness and spiritual support in advanced cancer patients of diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds and associations with quality of life (QOL), treatment preferences, and advance care planning. Methods The Coping With Cancer study is a federally funded, multi-institutional investigation examining factors associated with advanced cancer patient and caregiver well-being. Patients with an advanced cancer diagnosis and failure of first-line chemotherapy were interviewed at baseline regarding religiousness, spiritual support, QOL, treatment preferences, and advance care planning. Results Most (88%) of the study population (N = 230) considered religion to be at least somewhat important. Nearly half (47%) reported that their spiritual needs were minimally or not at all supported by a religious community, and 72% reported that their spiritual needs were supported minimally or not at all by the medi...

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Religiousness and Spiritual Support Among Advanced Cancer Patients and Associations With End-of-Life Treatment Preferences and Quality of Life

The Clinical Gaze in the Practice of Migrant Health: Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States

Discussing “Suffering Slot Anthropology” with Migrant Farm Workers

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health Action Framework aims to "make health a shared value" and improve population health equity through widespread culture change. The authors draw upon their expertise as anthropologists to identify 3 challenges that they believe must be addressed in order to effectively achieve the health equity and population health improvement goals of the Culture of Health initiative: clarifying and demystifying the concept of "culture," contextualizing "community" within networks of power and inequality, and confronting the crises of trust and solidarity in the contemporary United States. The authors suggest that those who seek to build a "Culture of Health" refine their understanding of how "culture" is experienced, advocate for policies and practices that break down unhealthy consolidations of power, and innovate solutions to building consensus in a divided nation.

/pdf/how-do-you-build-a-culture-of-health-a-critical-analysis-of-2ygwu4c43v.pdf

How Do You Build a “Culture of Health”? A Critical Analysis of Challenges and Opportunities from Medical Anthropology

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1469-8676.12829

The pandemic present.

In this paper, we respond to Leigh Binford’s excellent article “Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They be Reformed or Should They be Eliminated?” We offer three clarifying points to Binford’s article. First, in this time of widespread and increasingly aggressive racism and nationalism, we are concerned that calls for closing borders (including the discontinuation of TFWPs) may play further into these violent divisions. Second, TFWPs are not apparatuses that can be extricated from the larger context of transnational racialized capitalism, and ending them would not end the exploitation Binford rightly criticizes within them. Third, we—academics, activists, non-migrants, and non-farmworkers—should pay attention especially to what diverse migrants and farmworkers prioritize, think, say, and do in relation to these programs and in relation to their own well-being more generally. Finally, we highlight union work that has been listening to, and collaborating with, immigrant workers to help them make certain demands of the state normally outside the purview of TFWPs.

Seth M. Holmes

Papers

The Clinical Gaze in the Practice of Migrant Health: Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States

Discussing “Suffering Slot Anthropology” with Migrant Farm Workers

How Do You Build a “Culture of Health”? A Critical Analysis of Challenges and Opportunities from Medical Anthropology

The pandemic present.

Working to end farmworker oppression while listening to farmworkers and focusing on root causes in context