Graduate student Erin P. Finley, supervised by Dr. Peter J. Brown, will undertake anthropological research on how men's experiences with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other post-deployment stresses are shaped by ethnicity, family support, and military service. She will compare how Anglo- and Mexican-American male veterans of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan understand and respond to the stresses of deployment and the return to civilian life. The central research question is: how and to what degree are post-war trauma and distress shaped by the social and cultural environments in which they occur? While there has been considerable epidemiological research on the causes of PTSD, there still are questions remaining about how risk factors are mediated by social and cultural variables. Anthropological ethnographic methods are particularly well suited to filling that gap.
The researcher will carry out the research in the Tejeda clinic, which is overseen by the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio has large concentrations of veterans, military bases, and hospitals serving veterans. It is also a region where a large proportion of the population self-identifies as Mexican-American. Research methods will include participating in the lives of veterans and their families and a series of semi-structured interviews using tested survey instruments, for a sample of 160 veterans and family members, as well as a smaller sample of clinicians and community members. She also will gather data with standard checklists, scales, and questionnaires. The goal is to understand how veterans, families, clinicians, and fellow community members make sense of military and civilian life, and how these understandings are shaped by ethnicity, ideas about masculinity, and levels of PTSD-related or other psychological distress.
This research will contribute significantly to the education of a social scientist. It also will contribute to developing social science theory about the complex relationships between individual and group experience, on the one hand, and social and cultural norms, on the other. It also will provide insight into how best to support veterans and their families of different ethnic groups following combat deployment.
