Overview
This active, skill-based course aims to provide participants with advanced understanding of and hands-on experience with the skills and techniques of qualitative and ethnographic methods for conducting culturally-sensitive mental health research. Mental health research and practice in India continues to be dominated by biomedical approaches, with limited engagement between social sciences and mental health disciplines. Clinical ethnography is particularly suited to understanding the interface between sites of healing (such as the clinic) and people’s experiences of distress. This module on Clinically Applied Anthropology will provide hands-on training in applying these research methods, data analysis, and writing research results for public and academic audiences. This course will address this gap between theory and practice by developing participants’ skills. Sessions on qualitative research methods will cover ethnographic methods of data collection, analysis, ethics and documentation and dissemination of findings. The focus of the course will be on close engagement with specific projects that participants are involved in, whether as researchers or practitioners or development specialists. The course will include experiential elements to allow students to practice participant observation, semi-structured clinical ethnographic interviewing, writing of field notes and data analysis and exercises to effectively integrate ethnographic and qualitative methods into design of their own research. Key questions that will be addressed in the course are: 1) How do we integrate academic engagement and applied work in mental health research and practice 2) Specifically, for those engaged in work with clinical populations and settings, how do we bridge the gap between ‘culture’ and the ‘clinic’? 3) How can clinical ethnographic methods be applied for this purpose? Readings will include contemporary research in transcultural psychiatry, medical anthropology, qualitative research methods, writing strategies, and public health.