In 2011, African Americans in Tarrant County, Texas experienced an infant mortality rate of 14.3 per 1,000 live births. The leading cause of infant mortality in Tarrant County is prematurity and maternal nutritional status. Both maternal under-nutrition and over-nutrition are known risk factors for premature birth. Improving maternal nutrition, by reducing rates of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, and by increasing consumption of essential prenatal vitamins and nutrients, is a road to decreasing preterm birth in African Americans. This qualitative study, based on both anthropology and public health theory, of the nutrition behavior of a group of African American expectant mothers and the experience of their health care providers and co-facilitators had a goal to provide a foundation for future development of nutrition behavior research and education for this specific population. The main finding of this study was the substantial gap of lived experience and education between the patients and their providers and co-facilitators, which hinders delivery of care and the patients’ acquiescence to nutrition recommendations. The discrepancies between the authoritative knowledge of the providers and the bodily knowledge of expectant mothers were responsible for the ineffectiveness of nutrition recommendations.

This study used ethnographic and qualitative research methods to provide data-driven support for the use of next-of-kin interviews to enhance overdose fatality review (OFR) datasets. This study's community of practice is a group of substance-use professionals that use OFRs to share confidential data and monitor Lucas County, Ohio substance use trends. To analyze OFR data collection, un-silo information, and understand how to include next-of-kin (NOK) interviews in the dataset, this study used rapid analysis, semi-structured interviews, and virtual participant observation methods. Rapid analysis showed current methods sufficiently collected demographic, vital statistics, and postmortem data from coroner reports; however, NOK interviews supplied narrative-derived information often missing or inconsistent in the dataset. Interviews with the community of practice and decedents' NOK showed dissonance between the two's perceptions of overdoses in Lucas County. Participants discussed themes, e.g., stigma, burnout, strained resources, and increasing fentanyl contamination-related overdoses. NOK needed accessible web-based resource options, linkages to current programs or services, stigma-free harm reduction education, and opportunities to form connections. Professionals explained the impact of widespread mental health problems, extreme social isolation, and economic pressures on overdose prevention during COVID-19. Potentially contaminated illicit substance use increased during the pandemic, overburdening the community of practice and straining …

BMA Innovation Consulting is committed to serving consumers products that can play a more meaningful role in household cleaning. So far, their innovation department has used psychology-based principles and approaches that have helped them understand consumers’ preferences, attitudes and claimed needs in household cleaning. That said, little information has been collected on the active role that products play or could play as participants in the everyday dynamics of US consumers. An anthropological approach to the study of U.S. kitchens, as an important center of family interaction in U.S. households, should yield important insights to the design and development of products that can more effectively and more actively participate in those dynamics. With this project I am fundamentally proposing a new approach to the identification of critical product design requirements. Figure on the right shows the key differences between the psychology-derived principles the organization is mostly using today vs. the anthropological lenses through which I will be conducting my research. Overall, I will be leveraging existing knowledge in the “individual desires” realm, connecting it to the collective situation & cultural context within which “cleaning action” emerges.

When US veterans return home from serving their country reintegrating into civilian society is difficult. Adjustment is often associated with mental health stress and personal instability. One of the biggest predictors of successful reintegration is homeownership. The research is in partnership with Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity. The research seeks to explore the challenges veterans face when seeking homeownership.

Torture survivors find difficulty navigating through an unfamiliar healthcare and social service system. Many survivors who already face Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression also endure a secondary threat which leads to re-traumatization through the struggles of acculturation. The aim of this study is to determine: 1. Identify differences and assumptions between service providers’ and clients’ definitions of self-sufficiency; 2. Examine prominent barriers to self-sufficiency that survivors encounter; 3. Pinpoint the survival strategies that survivors use in order to cope with life in DFW; 4. Determine what resources CST staff, area service providers, and survivors feel need to be improved for CST and the DFW metroplex.

Embarking on a quest to uncover the shared experiences of Latinos with diabetes in the Central San Joaquin Valley is the principal issue discussed in this body of work. Diabetes is estimated to become a serious public health problem, with a current estimate of more than 30 million already afflicted. Engaging in participant-observation at a local clinic serving patients in a Diabetes Education Program and semi-structured interviews with Latinos attending the program, this research explores cultural experiences of diabetes. The primary aim of this research is to answer how health education information is accepted and interpreted based on cultural definitions of diabetes to inform diabetes management strategies.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, an intentional community of roughly 70 members in Northeastern Missouri, is working to create societal change through radical sustainable living practices and creation of a culture of eco-friendly and feminist norms. Members agree to abide by a set of ecological covenants and sustainability guidelines, committing to practices such as using only sustainably generated electricity, and no use or storage of personally owned vehicles on community property. Situated within the context of a sustainability study, this thesis explores how Dancing Rabbit is creating a more socially and ecologically just culture and how this lifestyle affects happiness and well-being.

It is estimated that nearly 14.5 million Americans are living with cancer today. A commonly overlooked component to quality cancer care, as defined by the Institute of Medicine, is the role of psychological and social support. Better known as psychosocial support, these needs reflect a broad spectrum of obstacles or assets in an individual’s personal life that may help or hinder their healing experience. Some psychosocial examples include coping skills, transportation to medical appointments, or appropriate knowledge to mitigate the physical impacts of the cancer process. Research has shown that by addressing these potential needs, a better health outcome may be achieved for cancer patients. Through participant observation at local psychosocial service establishments and through semi-structured interviews with service providers and adults diagnosed with cancer living in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, this thesis research seeks to explore how local cancer patients are learning of psychosocial services available to them, what barriers may exist in accessing these services, and what individuals may be doing to address their psychosocial needs, both formally or informally. Results yielded recommendations for local psychosocial providers to adjust their marketing of services and kinds of services offered as well as yielded recommendations for future academic research.

Many communities are promoting physical activity and active transportation as ways to combat childhood obesity and change sedentary lifestyles of school-age children. Safe Routes to School Youth Voices is a mixed methods approach to understanding the experiences and perceptions of middle school students surrounding the use of active transportation. Student experiences are explored both independently and in comparison to parental perspectives of barriers to actives transportation. Data were collected in the form of parent surveys, observations, student interviews, and student focus groups. This study aims to answer the following primary research questions: (1) What are the conditions experienced along the route? (2) What are the students' perceptions of barriers to active transportation? (3) What are the compensation practices that students take to overcome barriers? and (4) How do the students' perceptions compare with their parents? Interviews and focus groups were transcribed and coded using in-vivo, descriptive, structural and pattern methods. Primary themes which emerged include how conditions of walking to school, personal safety, compensation practices, and systematic barriers all affect the perceptions of active transportation of the student. Findings highlight the difficulties many students face when considering active transportation, and discuss the inconsistencies between student experience, parental perceptions, and intervention …

This research is focused on a group of vegan and vegan-curious individuals who are creating, building and maintaining a vegan community of practice in Houston, Texas. Through ethnographic methods, including participant observation, in-depth semi-structured interviews, surveys, quantitative analysis, and use of geographic information systems (GIS), this thesis considers motivations, group hierarchies, core and peripheral membership, practices, beliefs and construction of identity within the vegan community of practice. Further, concepts from the anthropology of religion are utilized in discourse analysis around conversion to ethical veganism, preaching, and religious-ethical beliefs around enlightenment and the principle of ahimsa. Utilizing subcultural studies and social movement theory, this thesis also shows how the vegan community of practice fits into vegan subcultures and the greater vegan lifestyle movement. Finally, as an applied project, deliverables to the client Vegan Society of PEACE includes both personal and structural barriers to veganism which are understood with respect to a race-conscious approach to veganism, and with special consideration given to the capitalist commodification of animals. Suggestions are given and strategies for growth of the community are highlighted at the end of this paper.

Charon's Garden Wilderness Area within the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma is a landscape that is granted federal protection through the Wilderness Act of 1964. The discourse of wilderness management is influenced by governmental policies and practice which organize knowledge surrounding the natural landscape, like with the formation and semantics of the Wilderness Act. The Wilderness Act establishes characteristics that are designed to monitor and control the landscape and serve as a baseline and criterion for further wilderness preservation. These characteristics render the wilderness space as governable. Conservation management alternatives are identified which bypass the duality of nature from western society suggested by the discourse of environmental policy. These alternatives are understood under two notions of behaviors and perceptions. The project's goal is to uncover wilderness users' recreation behaviors and perceptions of wilderness as a designated space. Through understanding and assessing user's behaviors and perception of wilderness, alternative policies and practices that offer sustainable management practices and recreation opportunities can be developed.

This research project sought to holistically understand how educators in Texas understand educational policies that impact LGBT students, their practices, and interventions in the classroom. The project looks at two policies: anti-bullying and sexual education policies, and provides evidence that they are intrinsically linked through the discourse surrounding LGBT issues in Texas schools.