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Faculty Profiles
Fran Barg
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PIA Research Interests: Disparities in health/cultural models
As a medical anthropologist, Fran Barg's work centers on understanding disparities in health and illness among different populations. Cognitive anthropologists talk about "cultural models" which are schemas that are shared by members of social groups (D'Andrade 1987). Cultural models help to explain why individuals who share similar experiences perceive and react to communication about health or illness in similar ways. In studying the unequal burden of breast cancer mortality on African American women in Philadelphia, for example, she found that the cultural model that low-income African American women have for breast cancer is not at all congruent with the way that breast cancer is portrayed in communication to the public by health professionals. Therefore, health education and health promotion efforts to encourage breast cancer screening among African American women miss the mark, because what is intended to be communicated by the health professionals is heard in a very different and negative way by African American women. Further, poor survival from breast cancer is often attributed to the behaviors of African American women (e.g. lack of adherence to mammography) and not to the structural and political conditions that create inequities in health.
A future project she will undertake is a study to identify the cultural model for caregiving among African American families in West Philadelphia caring for a loved one with cancer.
D'Andrade R. A folk model of the mind. In: Holland D, Quinn
N, eds. Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press; 1987
Recommended Links
The Urban Nutrition Initiative
Participatory Action Research Links
Difficulties in Participatory Action Research