Notes on EDM

Key Features

• discover basic criteria people use to make decisions of a given kind
• somewhat emic: elicited from and understandable by the people themselves
• part of general effort to develop cultural models -- what happens inside people's heads that results in their doing what they do
• composed of decision rules -- constraints and conditions on behavioral responses, a combination of cultural knowledge and experience
• may be series of decisions

Descriptive Models

• studied in naturalistic settings -- in vivo
• don't assume rational actor
• recurrent choice situations, like illness, where must regularly choose among known courses of action, and groups have developed standard ways of choosing -- shared criteria/processes

Contexts and Constraints of Models

• decide the decision
• works best if choose smaller contexts
• need whole decision process

Research Questions in medical anthro

• what health care alternatives are considered reasonable
• what variation is there in the group
• what criteria do people use?

Assumptions

• knowledge beliefs and social context directly determine health behavior
• group members share a cultural model
• intracultural variation exists in the shared decision model
• rules can be discerned and tested for predictiveness

Decision Criteria

• goals are situation specific, and goals determine criteria
• seriousness of problems adn the ordering of problems

Decision Trees

• people don't make complex calculations like the utility functions of economists
• they simplify the problem using hierarchical trees
• an alternative is experienced as a bundle of aspects/features
• decision makers manipulate these in fairly simple ways

Steps to build the model

• decide which decision you're studying
• select the set of alternatives
• conduct ethnographic interview; find an informant in your cultural scene and practice on him or her.
• in addition to interview, do some participant observation
• decide on the sample of decision makers to use to build the model.
• Discover the decision criteria: (A) using one informant, look for contrasts over decision makers, over space over time, (b) elicit criterion for contrasts using "why" questions, (c) construct first decision tree of first informant
• Build composite decision tree from individual trees
• combine trees from all informants

Steps to test the model

• formal questionnaire to get the answers to the decision criteria
• interview people about past decisions and outcomes
• count errors, revise model to have fewer errors

Ryan and Martinez

• diarrhea management