Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Ethnographic Investigation of Material Implications of Oral Health and Health Care in Central Appalachia

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral student Sarah Raskin (University of Arizona), supervised by Dr. Susan J. Shaw, will undertake cultural anthropological research on the material and symbolic aspects of the mouth in relation to oral health among central Appalachians, for whom toothlessness is both a stigmatizing cliché and an embodied reality. The goal of the research is to expand social science understanding of stigma, its emobodiment, and its connections to sociopolitical histories of community, state, and nation. The research has been timed to coincide with and collaborate with Virginia initiatives to expand access to basic dental health care in this region. The researcher will undertake thirteen months of multi-method ethnographic research in southwest Virginia, where 35 percent of adults report loss of many or all teeth, a rate more 7 times that of the rest of the United States. Research methods will include semi-structured interviews; free listing and ranking activities to elicit cultural models of the mouth and its care; structured observation; and media scans. She also will document experiences of tooth loss, oral pain, other dental sequelae, and experiences of home and clinical care. The research data will be analyzed using narrative and cultural consensus techniques. Research questions include: (1) how do healthcare providers, patients, and public health stakeholders conceive of the ideal mouth, ideal oral hygiene, and the possibility of achieving those ideals; and (2) is variability in how stakeholder conceptions correlated with structural, material, political economic, and/or symbolic factors. This research is significant because it extends narrative and cultural consensus analysis to an illness cluster and site understudied in social science. Through collaboration with local stakeholders, findings from this project will provide baseline data for future studies on the effects of Virginia's pilot project on oral health-care and disease. Funding this project also supports the education of a social scientist.