Nancy Scheper-Hughes Ethnographic Study

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Nancy Scheper- Hughes (1990) contributes an ethnographic study in the shantytown Alto do Cruzeiro of Northern Brazil including interviews, and first hand engagement in households of mothers with newborn infants. The author lived in the city and worked as community health worker (house-caller), as well as attending cultural circles organized by U.P.A.C. (Union for the Progress of Alto do Cruzeiro). Members of this union were used as key informants, research subjects, and assistants. Scheper- Hughes’ theological and methodological approach was derived from critical or Marxist phenomenology. Szwarcwald (2000) uses a geographical information system (GIS) to link mortality data and population census data, which allowed the establishment of the geographical …show more content…

The population of Szwarcwald’s study was the 24 “administrative regions” that compose the city, which were used as the geographical units. Mortality data were obtained from the Mortality Information System compiled by the Brazilian Ministry of Health. The author’s finding were illustrated using maps of the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, the geographical distribution of the homicide rate and number of neonatal intensive care beds in the city, and an administrative Region Factor Scores graph was presented. Sastry’s (2004) study was based on data from the survey (questionnaire) component of the Brazilian population censuses that were conducted in 1970, 1980 and 1991 (households were selected). Information was collected from this data set on housing conditions and demographic, social, and economical characteristics of each resident. From this the author constructed an index of child mortality for each mother using the techniques proposed by Trussell and Preston in 1982. Pinto (1997) based his writing on observed trends perceived from government records of demography and population in

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