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We review ethnographic methods that allow researchers to assess distress in a culturally sensitive manner. We begin with an overview of standardized biomedical and psychological approaches to assessing distress cross-culturally. We then focus on literature describing the development of reliable and valid culturally sensitive assessment tools that can serve as complements or alternatives to biomedical categories and diagnostic frameworks. The methods we describe are useful in identifying forms of suffering--expressed in culturally salient idioms of distress--that might be misidentified by biomedical classifications. We highlight the utility of a cognitive anthropological theoretical approach for developing measures that attend to local cultural categories of knowledge and experience. Attending to cultural insider perspectives is necessary because expressions of distress, thresholds of tolerance for distress, expectations about stress inherent in life, conceptions of the good life, symptom expression, and modes of help-seeking vary across cultures.

The goal of assessing psychosocial stress as a process and outcome in naturalistic (i.e., field) settings is applicable across the social, biological, and health sciences. Meaningful measurement of biology-in-context is, however, far from simple or straightforward. In this brief methods review, we introduce theoretical framings, methodological conventions, and ethical concerns around field-collection of markers of psychosocial stress that have emerged from 50 years of research at the intersection of anthropology and human biology. Highlighting measures of psychosocial stress outcomes most often used in biocultural studies, we identify the circumstances under which varied measures are most appropriately applied and provide examples of the types of cutting-edge research questions these measures can address. We explain that field-based psychosocial stress measures embedded in different body systems are neither equivalent nor interchangeable, but this recognition strengthens the study of stress as always simultaneously cultural and biological, situated in local ecologies, social--political structures, and time.

Theoretical and methodological developments guided by a cognitive theory of culture have advanced our understanding of cultural processes over the past 40 years. The theoretical construct of cultural models, developed in the 1970s, provided a more precise definition of culture. The cultural consensus model, introduced in 1986, enabled investigators to verify and analyze the degree to which culture was shared and how it was distributed. Subsequent advances in the cultural consensus model, especially the analysis of residual agreement, provided a more complete approach to describing intracultural diversity. Finally, the concept and measurement of cultural consonance, introduced in 1996, demonstrated how shared cultural models link to social practice. This article provides a brief overview of these trends in the study of culture, with an emphasis on how this theory and these methods have been applied in research.

The relationship between culture, as a set of norms that structure human social practice, and agency, as the human capacity to act, has been debated for decades. Achieving clarity in how these constructs intersect has been hampered by difficulty in measuring either one, and theory has not suggested how a model linking culture and agency might be specified. We present a model in which culture is measured as cultural consonance, or the degree to which individuals actually incorporate prototypes for behavior encoded in cultural models into their own behavior. This measurement is then integrated with a measure of individuals' sense of personal agency. In a previous study in urban Brazil, we found that personal agency was associated with higher cultural consonance, which in turn was associated with lower psychological distress; however, those data were from a cross-sectional survey, thus limiting the causal inference. Here we present the results of a follow-up study in which a subset of respondents was re-interviewed on average four years later. These data are consistent with a model in which cultural consonance is the proximate causal influence on psychological distress, while personal agency is a distal or exogenous influence. The implications of these results for the relative roles of culture and agency as influences on subjective well-being are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between culture and the individual is a central focus of social scientific research. This paper examines motivations that mediate between shared culture norms and individual actions. Inspired by the works of Leon Festinger and Melford Spiro, we posit that social network conformation (the perceived adherence of one's social network with norms) and internalization of cultural norms (incorporation of cultural models with the self-schema) will differentially shape behavior (cultural consonance) depending on the domain and individual characteristics. For the domain of gender roles among Brazilian men, religious affiliation results in different configurations of the individual and culture. Our findings suggest that, due to changing and competing cultural models, religious men are compelled to reflexively "think" about what masculinity means to them, rather than subconsciously conform to social (hegemonic) expectations. This study demonstrates the importance of considering the impetus of culturally informed behaviors and, in doing so, provides a methodological means for measuring and interpreting such motivations, an important factor in the relationship between culture and the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the replication after 10 years of cultural consensus analyses in four cultural domains in the city of Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. Additionally, two methods for evaluating residual agreement are applied to the data, and a new technique for evaluating how cultural knowledge is represented by residual agreement is introduced. We found that overall cultural consensus observed in 2001 was replicated in 2011 in four cultural domains. Significant residual agreement in all four cultural domains was observed using a technique for assessing the structure of the respondent-by-respondent agreement matrix. Analysis of loadings on the second factor from the cultural consensus analyses indicated that time period was associated with residual agreement in the domain of lifestyle, while other variables were associated with residual agreement in other domains. The variation in the configuration of elements in the cultural model of lifestyle within each time period, relative to the overall consensus, was examined using deviation scores. Implications of these results for the study of culture and the distribution and sharing of culture are discussed.

This study uses mixed methods and theory from cognitive anthropology to examine the cultural models of domestic violence among domestic violence agency workers, welfare workers, nurses, and a general population comparison group. Data collection and analysis uses quantitative and qualitative techniques, and the findings are integrated for interpretation. Findings reveal consensus among service providers on how controllable domestic violence factors are and whether they are most characteristic of victims or perpetrators, but diversity with regard to their understandings of the importance of the factors suggesting that occupational category alone is inadequate in predicting service providers' beliefs and subsequent delivery of services. The implications of the findings extend into the areas of domestic violence service delivery, cognitive anthropology, and mixed methods research. (Contains 4 notes, 4 tables, and 2 figures.)

This study employed a unique theoretical approach and a series of participant-based ethnographic interviewing techniques that are traditionally used in cognitive anthropology to examine and compare social work and anthropology students' cultural models of the causes of domestic violence. The study findings indicate that although social work students and anthropology students share understandings of a general model of domestic violence, social work students agree on distinctive elements of this model that anthropology students do not. These findings are important in better understanding the role social work education plays in developing social workers' understandings of the roots of domestic violence. (Contains 2 figures and 5 tables.)

Reports on the findings of a study of drug and alcohol use among adolescents (N=779) who attended middle schools in a large urban city in the southwest United States. Examines the relationships between substance use, social support, and a variety of other psychosocial factors. Discusses implications of those relationships for human service practice and research. (Author/MKA)