When Culture Impacts Health: Global Lessons for Effective Health Research

Bringing the hard-to-quantify aspects of lived experience to analysis, and emphasizing what might be lost in interventions if cultural insights are absent, this book includes case studies from across the Asia and Pacific regions –Bangladesh, Malaysia, New Guinea, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Tuvalu and the Cook Islands. When Culture Impacts Health offers conceptual, methodological and practical insights into understanding and successfully mediating cultural influences to address old and new public health issues including safe water delivery, leprosy, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and body image. It contains useful methodological tools – how to map cultural consensus, measure wealth capital, conduct a cultural economy audit, for example. It provides approaches for discerning between ethnic and racial constructs and for conducting research among indigenous peoples. The book will be indispensible for culture and health researchers in all regions.

• Discusses global application of case descriptions
• Demonstrates how a cultural approach to health research enriches and informs our understanding of intractable public health problems
• Covers methods and measurements applicable to a variety of cultural research approaches as well as actual research results
• Case studies include medical anthropology, cultural epidemiology, cultural history and social medicine perspectives

"Banwell, Ulijaszek, and Dixon assemble 30 essays by health sociology, medical and bio-anthropology, cultural anthropology, and epidemiology researchers from Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, and the UK, who provide medical anthropologists and social epidemiologists with conceptual and measurement tools to improve their understanding of how culture affects population health behaviors and chronic and infectious disease risks and demonstrate how public health can influence culture to encourage healthy lifestyles."--Reference and Research Book News, August 2013