DDIG: Culture, Trauma, and Health: Social Suffering in Guatemala

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Graduate student Brian Tyler, under the supervision of Dr. Clarence C. Gravlee, will explore how social and cultural factors shape the health effects of traumatic experience in a former refugee community in Guatemala, a decade after the formal cessation of civil war. The specific goals are (1) to integrate existing research in anthropology and epidemiology on the embodiment of trauma; (2) to explore inter- and intra-cultural variation in cultural models of traumatic experience; and (3) to test whether cultural meaning mediates the relationship between traumatic experience and health. The researcher will conduct 12 months of field research using qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first phase, he will use participant observation and two rounds of ethnographic interviews to explore cultural models of traumatic experience. The first set of interviews will elicit narratives about traumatic experiences and culturally appropriate ways of coping with these experiences. The second set of interviews will elicit structured ethnographic data to assess the level of agreement and intra-cultural variation in cultural models of trauma and coping. In the second phase of the project, the researcher will conduct a small epidemiologic survey to test whether culturally-grounded measures of traumatic experiences explain more variation in individual mental and biological health outcomes than do conventional biomedical measures. The project is significant for both theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretically, the project addresses key limitations of previous biomedical and anthropological research on the health consequences of traumatic experiences. One limitation of existing biomedical research is that researchers typically focus on the individual and neglect how sociocultural context shapes mental, biological, and behavioral processes. By contrast, previous anthropological research, which typically seeks to capture how experience is culturally constructed, has not systematically connected sociocultural context back to individual health outcomes. This study bridges the gap between biomedical and anthropological research by testing how shared constructions of traumatic experience relate to individual well-being. In practical terms, this study will contribute new knowledge about the social and cultural influences on population health that may inform future interventions to reduce the burden of poor health among victims of traumatic experiences.