PubMed · 13977503
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W B SIMON. 1963. Race relations and class structures.. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1963.9922189
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Between the 15th and 19th centuries ad, the Atlantic slave trade resulted in the forced movement of approximately 13 million people from Africa, mainly to the Americas. Only approximately 11 million survived the passage, and many more died in the early years of captivity. We have studied 481 mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) of recent African ancestry in the Americas and in Eurasia, in an attempt to trace them back to particular regions of Africa. Our results show that mtDNAs in America and Eurasia can, in many cases, be traced to broad geographical regions within Africa, largely in accordance with historical evidence, and raise the possibility that a greater resolution may be possible in the future. However, they also indicate that, at least for the moment, considerable caution is warranted when assessing claims to be able to trace the ancestry of particular lineages to a particular locality within modern-day Africa.
This paper is concerned with understanding why some women accept their invitation for free screening mammography and others do not. Free screening mammography is offered to women aged 50-64 in Britain. Uptake of invitations is about twice as high in leafy suburbs than in inner-city areas. Low uptake in inner-city areas has been attributed to "problems" of black and minority ethnic women. The research reported here was carried out in Hackney, an inner city London borough with an ethnically diverse and socially deprived population. Hackney also has the lowest uptake of screening mammography in the country. Twenty focus groups were held. Participants included white, black and minority ethnic women. Eight focus groups were conducted in English; 12 in other languages. Some methodological issues raised by undertaking qualitative research in several languages are considered. The research demonstrates how the inclusion of white women in research which operationalises ethnicity minimizes the risk of developing an analysis focusing on "problems" of black and minority ethnic women and encourages the development of general themes which may apply to all women. The analysis focuses on candidacy, that is, women's assessment of risk of their disease, and compliance, that is, the explanations respondents volunteered for accepting or refusing an invitation to attend for mammography. Candidacy and ethnicity emerge as similar constructs, manipulated by women to make claims about their risk of breast cancer. Other, non-medical reasons were given for compliance which serve as a warning about assuming that, when women accept their invitation, they do so for same the reasons the architects of the National Health Service Breast Screening Programme had in mind.
It has been consistently reported that the African-Caribbean population in the UK are more likely than their White counterparts to access psychiatric services via the police and under compulsion. The reasons for these differences are poorly understood. This paper comprises two main parts. The first provides a comprehensive review of research in this area, arguing the current lack of understanding stems from a number of methodological limitations that characterise the research to date. The issue of ethnic variations in pathways to psychiatric care has been studied almost exclusively within a medical epidemiological framework, and the potential insights offered by sociological and anthropological research in the fields of illness behaviour and health service use have been ignored. This has important implications as the failure of research to move beyond enumerating differences in sources of referral to psychiatric services and rates of compulsory admission means no recommendations for policy or service reform have been developed from the research. The second part of the paper sets out the foundations for future research, arguing that the pathway to care has to be studied as a social process subject to a wide range of influences, including the cultural context within which illness is experienced. It is further argued that Kleinman's (Patients and healers in the context of culture: an exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine and psychiatry, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1980) Health Care System model offers a particularly valuable preliminary framework for organising and interpreting future research. It is only through gaining a more qualitative understanding of the processes at work in shaping different responses to mental illness and interactions with mental health services that the patterns observed in quantitative studies can be fully understood. This further reflects the need for a bridge between the social sciences and psychiatry if services are to be developed to respond to the increasing diversity of modern societies.