Understanding health related behaviours and beliefs in north-west Tanzania; environmental health knowledges and coping strategies

摘要

Background: This article draws on a socio-cultural perspective to analyse public perceptions of health risks, which are based on complex interactions between social and cultural factors within a particular social space. This approach challenges traditional bio-medical and scientific approaches to understanding health related behaviours. The article discusses how local communities perceive risks, and draws out the important distinction between 'risk' (the event) and vulnerability (the social context of that risk), providing a justification for the socio-cultural approach to health. This exploration then leads into a discussion of knowledge, or information, assumptions and judgements that inform health related decisions. Aim: To explores the way people make sense of of environmental health risks based on experiences. We address the following research questions: (1) What are the perceptions and beliefs of rural citizens regarding factors that produce or prevent health? (2) How is the socio-cultural perspective important in understanding and theorizing environmentally related health? Methodology: Ethnographic research including participant observation, focus groups and in-depth interviews. Analysis and interpretation of data employed ground theory based on emergent themes. Results and conclusions: Generally, results show that individuals respond purposeful so that to safeguard their social and cultural values. In order to achieve that villagers use different approaches such as comparative judgement (compare themselves with more resilient individuals or animals); fatalism (when challenges are felt inevitable), and internalising risks (a sense of personal or social invulnerability). Our finding sheds light on why local people sometimes reject, ignore or manipulate health interventions in a manner that seems, from an external scientific perspective, to be 'illogical'.