Cultural influences on the management of environmental health risks among low-income pregnant women

Following environmental health disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Oil Spill, U.S. Gulf residents expressed concern regarding air quality. Women with children make many decisions that mitigate household air quality risks; however, research examining culture's influence in their risk perception and the influence which this has on their behaviour is limited. In this article we examine the cultural connection between low-income women with children along the U.S. Gulf concerning the local threat of air quality. We used cultural consensus analysis to examine the perceptions of low-income, first-time pregnant women. We undertook an interview survey of 112 women living in Southeast Louisiana, USA between May 2014 and March 2015. In this article we examine if there was a shared (cultural) understanding among these women on how to manage air quality threats, to evaluate what determined cultural sharing in the group, and to explore what role cultural beliefs played in their intended household strategies. We found that although air quality was rarely discussed by the women in our study, we were able to identify two multi-centric cultural models of how these women sought to make sense of air quality issues. In one model they relied on their immediate social network of family and friends while in the other model they were willing to make use of official sources of information. These two models helped explain what measures these women planned to take to address air quality issues in an around their household. Our findings show that cultural norms permeate the assessment of risk in a community and that programmes designed to improve public health need to take into account the cultural context of the population.