Rubel 9320624 This project supports the research of a team of cultural anthropologists studying how people in two Mexican communities conceive of respiratory disease in general and pulmonary tuberculosis in particular. Using a quantitative technique of consensus analysis, the project will interview two cohorts of patients: TB sufferers, and patients who have not been diagnosed with that specific disease but who exhibit respiratory symptoms. The specific hypotheses to be tested relate to how individuals adapt their folk understanding of a well-defined disease to the biomedical model which they are exposed to during treatment -- whether persons more expert in their own folk theory are better able to learn a different, biomedical theory. This project is important because many local populations have folk models of disease; advances in our understanding of how individuals holding these models adapt in response to specific experiences and information can help design delivery procedures which increase people's compliance with medical treatments. ***
