ABSTRACT
The need for field techniques to provide rapid and detailed data on complex social and behavioural phenomena has been given considerable impetus with the advent of HIV/AIDS. It has highlighted the contrasting approaches of epidemiology and the social sciences. Traditionally, epidemiologists study a limited number of variables in large samples to provide statistical evidence of relationships. The parameters of the study are firmly established before data collection begins. But interest has grown in aspects of the relationship between health and behaviour not amenable to so strict a format of scientific investigation. Anthropologists, in particular, have cultivated the opposite end of the methodological spectrum, looking in great detail at small groups over long periods of time. The anthropologist might start work with no hypothesis as such — only an area of interest and the theoretical constructs of anthropological theory. A study of a group’s cultural concepts of sickness and health, for instance, could well provide descriptive knowledge of great depth and detail, highly relevant to the health issues of that particular people. Such findings are likely to be of limited generalizability, however, and to rely on data-gathering skills irreducible to repetitive structured techniques. The social and demographic characteristics and the mortality an morbidity of large populations, typically the concern of epidemiology, are beyond the scope of classic anthropological work.
