The Navajor Infant Feeding Project will investigate how ethnicity and cultural context affect infant feeding patterns and will develop informaton useful to the promotion of breast feeding among the Navajo.
Its specific aims are 1) to determine the prevalence of breast- and bottle-feeding among the Navajo, 2) to characterize Navajo weaning practices, 3) to identify structural factors which impact infant feeding practices, 4) to characterize women who terminate breast-feeding early in contrast to those who persist, and 5) to elicit attitudes and beliefs of Navajo women regarding infant feeding. This study of the social and behavioral factors which affect nutritional status of Navajo infants should be directly applicable to improving the health of these children. This cross-sectional study of infant feeding practices in the first 9 months of life will be conducted at three research sites which were selected to reflect the diversity of lifestyle on the reservation. The project will utilize both qualitative and quantitate methods to investigate infant feeding practices. Ethnographic inteviews, observations and decision modeling will be used to develop new hypotheses, to investigate behaviors in the context of daily decisions, and to provide a vocabulary for a questionnarie. Such qualitative techniques are essential because modern Navajo feeding patterns have not been studied and ethnicity has been identified as an important predictor of infant feeding beliefs and behaviors. Subsequently, a survey interview stragety will be used to permit the testing of these and other hypotheses for general applicability to the Navajo case, as well as to describe individual variability in feeding patterns and its correlation. A third aspect of the study will entail a medical record review, to provide feeding information on a larger number of mother-infant dyads and to assess represenativeness of the survey sample. The use of both quantitative and qualitative techniques is essential to the understanding of the range of biological social, and cultural factors which affect infant feeding decisions in a context of diversity and cultural change. The project is jointly proposed by invesigators at the University of Arizona and Navajo Community College.
