Anthropologists Dr. Deborah L. Crooks (University of Kentucky), Dr. Lisa C. Cliggett (University of Kentucky), and Dr. Craig A. Hadley (Emory University) will convene a three-day workshop to develop a new cross-culturally valid conceptual framework to guide future research on the relationship between food security and mental health. The World Health Organization now defines mental health as a "state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community." Working from this less medicalized perspective, the workshop will bring together researchers and technical experts to plan, strategize, and standardize (for comparison purposes) new research on the relationship between food insecurity and mental health across a range of research sites.
The workshop has three overarching goals: (1) a conceptual framework and underlying model to guide future research on food insecurity and mental health that is applicable across a variety of field sites, allows for comparison of findings beyond the household and community levels, and provides research results for use by program planners and policy makers; (2) valid, reliable, and culturally appropriate instruments of data collection for the empirical assessment of food insecurity and mental health across varied ethnographic sites; and (3) a plan for centrally locating, sharing and compiling research results in a way that enables cross-cultural comparisons across various regions of the world.
The workshop is important because it will lay the groundwork for a cross-culturally valid, comprehensive, and synthetic understanding of the relationship between food insecurity and mental health, which will allow policy makers to improve mitigation strategies on multiple scales. The workshop will enhance research infrastructure by bringing together experts from different backgrounds around a central research problem; and will facilitate mentoring relationships between junior and senior colleagues that are likely to go beyond the time and place of the workshop. Results will be disseminated through conference papers and journal publications.
This 3-day workshop (October 13-15, 2010) brought together 20 researchers (experts in the areas of anthropology, food security and health and well-being) and 5 graduate students for purposes of developing a research model for a global project on food insecurity and mental health. The resulting conceptual model (The Global Food Insecurity and Mental Health Project) links food insecurity to mental health outcomes through a variety of pathways that include social support; stigma and shame; household composition and livelihoods; national and regional structural factors; community characteristics; and market prices. Following the workshop, the five organizers developed a multi-method research protocol to enable testing of the relationships outlined in the model across a variety of field sites, sharing the protocol with all workshop participants. The entire research protocol will be made public for use by other researchers once it has been tested during field research and fine-tuned as needed. To-date, the workshop has generated six papers at national scientific meetings (Society for Applied Anthropology and the Human Biology Association), as well as 3 journal article submissions (under review) and is currently forming the basis of three grant proposals for future research using the developed protocol - more are likely to follow. The broader impacts of the workshop rest on a more synthetic understanding of the relationship between food insecurity and mental health than was available in the past. The conceptual model makes theoretical contributions to the fields of anthropology, development, public health and nutrition; and the anticipated results of the ensuing research will allow policy makers to plan more effective mitigation strategies on global and local scales. Because the workshop brought together researchers with expertise in numerous regions around the world, as well as experts in the design of scaled instruments, policy, and multi-method, multi-sited research, it has already succeeded in enhancing research infrastructure, which will be further enhanced through sharing and compilation of the results of field research. Including graduate students among the participants integrated research and learning; students were equal participants in creating the research model, and have full access to the research protocols for their own dissertation work. One student has already utilized parts of the protocol for summer fieldwork as part of an NSF REG grant.
