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The Cultural Construction of Social Support in Brazil: Associations with Health Outcomes

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Abstract

The association of social support and healthoutcomes has received considerable attention inrecent years, but the cultural dimension of socialsupport has not been extensively investigated. Inthis paper, using data collected in a Braziliancity, we present results indicating that thoseindividuals whose reported access to social supportmore closely approximates an ideal cultural model ofaccess to social support have lower blood pressureand report fewer depressive symptoms and lowerlevels of perceived stress. The cultural model ofsocial support is derived using a combination ofparticipant observation, semi-structured interviews,and the systematic ethnographic technique ofcultural consensus modelling. These results arethen used to develop a measure of an individual‘sapproximation to that model of social support in asurvey of four diverse neighborhoods in the city(n = 250). We call this approximation to the idealcultural model of social support ‘culturalconsonance’ in social support. The association ofhealth outcomes with cultural consonance in socialsupport is independent of individual differences inthe reporting of social support, and of standardcovariates. In the case of blood pressure andperceived stress, it is independent of diet, andother socioeconomic and psychosocial variables. Theassociation with depressive symptoms is notindependent of other psychosocial variables. Theimplications of these results are discussed withrespect to research on cultural dimensions of thedistribution of disease.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Behavioral and Community Medicine, University of Alabama School of Medicine, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487-0326, USA

    William W. Dressler

  2. University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, 14.049, Brazil

    Mauro Campos Balieiro & Jose Ernesto Dos Santos

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  1. William W. Dressler
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  2. Mauro Campos Balieiro
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  3. Jose Ernesto Dos Santos
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Dressler, W.W., Balieiro, M.C. & Dos Santos, J.E. The Cultural Construction of Social Support in Brazil: Associations with Health Outcomes. Cult Med Psychiatry 21, 303–335 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005394416255

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