As an increasingly common form of health-seeking behavior, religious healing has become a factor relevant to the study of the broader national health care system. In the initial funding period, the present project has focused on identifying critical elements of therapeutic process in religious healing through an ethnographic case study of the Catholic Pentecostal healing system. In addition to completing the goals of the initial project period, the renewal extends the study to a comparison of sessions of religious healing and psychotherapy, and examination of ethnic variation within the religious healing system itself. The long range goal of this project is to contribute to an anthropological theory of therapeutic process that will be valid for crosscultural comparative studies of healing systems, including religious and folk healing as well as psychotherapy.
Specific aims are: to examine interaction between religious and professional health care systems with respect to the social and symbolic organization of charismatic healing; to examine experiential dimensions of therapeutic process among participants in religious healing sessions; to compare sessions of psychotherapy with religious healing; to provide normative data on typical Catholic Pentecostal participants for contrast with healers and their patients; to compare pilot data on a Hispanic variant of the Catholic Pentecostal healing system with results obtained for the Anglo-American study. The overall research design calls for new analyses of previously collected data on sessions of religious healing and pschotherapy, using post-session questionnaires, Experience Scale ratings, and thematic analyses of post-session interview texts. The methods include both qualitative and quantitative techniques, and combine approaches of interpretive ethnography and psychotherapy process research. A series of hypothesis will be tested to examine the relationship between type of healing and socioeconomic status, gender, symptom level, and ethnicity. The final product will be an ethnographic account of the Catholic Pentecostal healing system, emphasizing its place in the contemporary health care system, its relation to psychotherapy, the role of cultural meaning and symbolic action in the experience of participants, and a formulation of elements of therapeutic process.
