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Applied Project Stage 2: Intervention (Due Week 5)

In stage 2, you will use what you learned in stage 1 about your own household’s production of health, as well as readings and discussions, to create an intervention to address this issue in your household. The intervention may promote wellness, prevent disease, educate household members, or be intended to cure or alleviate suffering in some way.

This exercise is not “for real” (unless you want it to be), and it can be as creative as you like. For example, if someone in your household suffers from chronic pain, based on your reading about how people from different cultural worlds cope with chronic pain, you might design an intervention that incorporates heat and ice, pain medications, acupuncture, meditation, psychotherapy, and shamanic healing.

Required Tasks:

8. Develop an intervention that addresses at least one health-related issue in your household that you identified in your ethnographic (An intervention is some kind of action plan to eliminate or alleviate a problem.) This issue DOES NOT have to be the same issue discussed in component “f” above. Now is the time to focus on one issue. Try to find articles about your issue in the anthropology journals listed in the description of the Literature Review above or use any of our course readings that might deal with your issue to get ideas or to better understand how this issue may be experienced and dealt with in different cultural contexts.
9. Ideas about the body, the person, health, illness, treatment, that underlie your intervention. These ideas should explain why  you think your intervention will work.  Think about your understandings and beliefs about how the body works, why “trouble” starts, what’s needed to fix it and why, etc.  Again, if you can find articles about your issue in anthropology journals or if your issue has been discussed in any of our course readings, compare your ideas with those of others.
10. Features of the social, political, and economic environment and available/unavailable resources that will either support or impede implementing your The point of this is to help you understand how “no man is an island” – your health and well-being are intricately connected to the context in which you live, to your immediate and larger social worlds.
11. Possible unintended consequences (either positive or negative) of your intervention.  Most interventions have unintended consequences.  For example, if you institute an exercise regimen for one person in the household, s/he may injure him/herself or, on the other hand, an intervention introduced to help one person in your household may spill over to other members of the household and their health may improve though they were not the “target” of the intervention.

Intervention	Developed a creative intervention for any issue that you identified in your ethnography that incorporated what has been learned in the course.  This issue can be, but does NOT have to be related to the illness episode you described.	Developed an intervention plan that related somewhat to what has been learned in the course	Intervention plan did not relate to what has been learned in the course or did not submit project
Culturally Constructed Ideas	Demonstrated excellent ability to identify cultural ideas about the body, person, health, illness, treatment, etc. that underlie your intervention.  What do you think what you want to do will work?	Demonstrated adequate ability to identify cultural themes and underlying ideas	Demonstrated poor or no ability to identify cultural themes and underlying ideas or did not submit project
Environment	Excellent discussion of the physical, political, social, and economic environment that will either facilitate or impede the implementation of the intervention	Adequate discussion of the physical, political, social, and economic environment that will either facilitate or impede the implementation of the intervention	Inadequate discussion of the physical, political, social, and economic environment that will either facilitate or impede the implementation of the intervention or did not submit project
Unintended Consequences	Excellent discussion of possible unintended consequences of your intervention	Adequate discussion of unintended consequences	Inadequate discussion of unintended consequences or

			did not submit project
Evaluation Plan	Excellent and comprehensive evaluation plan including reasonable objectives, outcome measures, and other assessments that relate well to the intervention.  Make sure you measure what you hope to achieve in your intervention.	Adequate evaluation plan	Inadequate evaluation plan that does not include objectives, outcome measures; in other words, a plan that does not actually evaluate the intervention or did not submit project
Comparison to Other Setting	Demonstrated comprehensive knowledge of own setting and appropriately compared its resources and challenges to those of another setting	Demonstrated adequate knowledge of own setting and appropriately compared its resources and challenges to those of another setting	Inadequate demonstration of knowledge of own setting and inadequate comparison or did not submit project
Writing Quality	No or less than 3	3-5 errors in spelling	More than 5
	errors in spelling or	or grammar	errors in spelling
	grammar including	including incomplete	or grammar
	incomplete sentences	sentences	including
			incomplete
			sentences

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