This project involves the dissertation research of a student in cultural anthropology in a rural area of Cameroon. The research will investigate how people's perceptions of illnesses and treatment alternatives, and their evaluations of treatment results, influence their health-seeking behavior. Most studies of health-seeking behavior examine how isolated beliefs correlate with treatment behavior; in contrast this project analyzes the medical decision-making process. The project will examine social networks and group consensus using ethnography, formal and informal interviews, and relatively new analytical procedures in cognitive anthropology to study how group agreement on categorizations and evaluations influence behavior. This research is important because lay people in all societies have divergent "popular models" of illness and treatment, which sometimes support but often conflict with scientifically-derived treatment regimes. Understanding the importance of cultural factors in medical decision making in this one case will advance our theoretical knowledge about compliance and health seeking behavior in general.
