| Popis: |
Most social scientific studies of health, illness, and health behavior assume that lay people's knowledge can be adequately described as a matter of ignorance and misinformation judged against the paradigm of biomedical, scientific knowledge. This study seeks to understand the everyday illness knowledge and beliefs of lay people. I investigate the degree to which such folk knowledge varies culturally in ways that cannot be explained solely by comparison with scientific knowledge. I examine patterns in the distribution of knowledge of the spread of hepatitis C (HCV) and investigate how social characteristics influence forms of knowledge. This was a mixed methods study consisting of qualitative textual data from in-depth interviews (N=42) and quantitative secondary data from a large Centers for Disease Control (CDC) telephone survey (N=3092). The in-depth interviews were transcribed and then coded using qualitative data analysis software. The survey data was analyzed with exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, latent class analysis, and latent class analysis with covariates. The qualitative analysis found that the HCV patients had a broad range of knowledge about how HCV can be spread. The patients discussed many transmission vectors that were not present in the CDC survey of knowledge of how HCV is spread. The quantitative analysis found that knowledge of the spread of HCV takes three forms: HCV is Everywhere, HCV is Nowhere, and "expert" awareness of HCV. Education, income, race, age, marital status, knowing someone with HCV, and perceived risk of HCV significantly influenced the likelihood of having each particular form of knowledge. In synthesizing the qualitative and quantitative results, I conclude that how we describe people's knowledge can be in part a function of which questions we as researchers chose to ask and how we chose to examine the responses. Variation in lay people's knowledge of the spread of HCV is culturally situated and cannot be viewed simply as part of a continuum of fidelity to biomedical and scientific evidence. I further conclude that the forms of knowledge of the spread of HCV are connected to social structure and social inequality. |
