PART TWO: Modernization and Illness in a Newfoundland Community

TY - JOUR

T1 - PART TWO

T2 - Modernization and Illness in a Newfoundland Community

AU - Ness, Robert C.

N1 - Funding Information: 1. Northeast Harbour is a pseudonym. Field research was conducted continuously from May 1973 until June 1974. Financial support was provided by a training grant from the National Institutes of Health, Washington, D.C., administered by the Social Sciences and Health Services Training Program in the Department of Community Medicine and Health Care, University of Connecticut Health Center. I wish to thank my wife Nancy for her extensive field research relevant to this paper, and Pertti Pelto for his editorial assistance. 2. Similar criticisms can also be directed at epidemiological research focusing on specific physical disease conditions. In these studies, research- ers typically identify study populations only after individuals have developed one particular pathological outcome. Individuals with different illnesses, as well as those who are "well," are typically excluded from analysis. Consequently, differential sets of socioeconomic conditions are not associated with distinct pathological and/or benign outcomes. Longitudinal studies may correct this omission, but this design is usually expensive and time-consuming. 3. Pretesting and administration of the CMI are discussed in detail in Ness (1976: 241-246). 4. Only 21%of the men employed at the mine work underground; others had various jobs "on the surface." "Full-time" fishermen are able to fish only from May or June through November. 5. The household income reported here represents the total cash income earned in 1973 from all sources (cf. Ness 1976). 6. All married women were considered eligible for the study because the household, composed of husband, wife, and children is the basic unit of social organization within the community. A cut-off age of 30 was pragmatically adopted for unmarried women. 7. The CMI consists of 18 subscales but only 16 were retained for analysis. Subscales numbered 11 and 12 (Miscellaneous Diseases, and Habits, respectively) were omitted because the internal consistency of these two subscales, computed in terms of alpha coefficients (Nunally 1967), was not acceptable (cf. Ness 1976). This finding reflects the extreme heterogeneity of the questions within these subscales. 8. The complete estimation method employed by the SPSS program was used to compute factor scores for each respondent (see Nie et al. 1975: 487-488). 9. The CMI factor labeled "Lack of Eye-Ear Complaints" has been arbitrarily removed from the analysis. Step-wise regressions, employing pair-wise deletion of missing values, were obtained using the SPSS software (see Nie et al. 1975: 320-350). 10. Only one published study using the CMIhas employed a factor analytic technique. Marks (1967) explored this procedure for the diagnosis', classification and evaluation of phobia patients. 11. I am aware of the danger involved in developing a "causal" argument based on correlational data. In this case, however, I believe my discussion is sound because: 1) the economic variables measured arc fundamentally a function of a husband's occupation (rather than, for example, the woman's health status); and 2) the poorer households have a history of poverty, reaching back prior to the onset of modernization. Their lack of success in modernization appears then to be a function of their past social and economic handicaps.

PY - 1977/9/1

Y1 - 1977/9/1

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84963177678&partnerID=8YFLogxK

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U2 - 10.1080/01459740.1977.9965827

DO - 10.1080/01459740.1977.9965827

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:84963177678

SN - 0145-9740

VL - 1

SP - 25

EP - 53

JO - Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness

JF - Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness

IS - 4

ER -