Center for Culture & Health
Semel Institute (NPI)
Research Group:	Center for Culture & Health
Information:	The Center for Culture and Health examines how social, structural, psychological, and cultural factors affect mental and physical health. We specialize in longitudinal studies of children and youth at risk, and the family dynamics that shape and are shaped by health, sickness, and medical experience. Our strengths include the study of factors that influence medical decision making, and the cultural meanings linked with various psychological and medical conditions. We are interested in whether and how culture, ethnicity, and race may shape individual, family, and group experience, and the nature of interactions among ethnicity/race, social class, gender, and health. Immigrant families and children are a strong interest at the Center. Current studies include African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Asian-Americans (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian), European-Americans, Mexicans, and other Latino groups. Our methodological strengths include systematic approaches to the collection and analysis of qualitative data, mixed methods, techniques for analyzing links between qualitative and quantitative approaches, and interactions among micro, intermediate, and macro-levels of analysis. Faculty and research staff include anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and other biobehavioral social scientists. We teach in various academic departments and programs in addition to our home Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences (NPI), including Anthropology, Education, Psychology, Public Health, Ethnic Studies, and Women's Studies. We teach formal courses to both undergraduate and graduate students, participate in undergraduate research programs, mentor graduate students by serving as members of their M.A. and Ph.D. advisory committees, and supervise postdoctoral trainees. The Center currently is the home for the National Institute of Mental Health funded Family Research Consortium IV, a national collaborative network of scholars interested in families and mental health. We also house the Fieldwork and Qualitative Data Laboratory (funded in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development), which offers training in the collection, management, and analysis of qualitative data, and support for integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods. Our research findings have stimulated changes in health services delivery systems, teacher training in public schools, school-based mental illness prevention programs, and family counseling practices in Southern California and elsewhere in the U.S.
Director:	Weisner, Thomas