Involvement in Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Social Stratification-relevant Motivations and Enabling Factors

• In Event: 343 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Alternative, Elective, and Innovative Healthcare

Abstract

This paper proposes initial exploratory work to develop a model for social stratification-relevant processes predicting involvement in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). I first review the literature and identify two important sets of factors — motivation and enabling. Within motivation, I focus on need for medical intervention (i.e., health condition) and trust in the medical institution. I focus on social capital (connections that facilitate knowledge about and access to CAM) as an enabling factor. I propose a typology of CAM users with distinct motivations: desperate advantaged, preventive or recreational, distrustful advantaged, and wary disadvantaged. I then propose a working model of how the motivating and enabling factors inform the typology and involvement in CAM as an outcome (both generally and specific types). I propose two sets of statistical analyses to assess the typology and working model. Analyses will use four sets of data, each with their own strengths and weaknesses for evaluating the research questions. Finally, I discuss how results will inform future work in collecting data from different types of CAM users. In-depth interviews and network analyses should provide valuable insight into the questions of interest. This step with existing data will assess the viability of the theoretical framework, and inform the questions and issues to address when collecting the new qualitative data. Results from this project may have implications for reducing health inequalities between high- and low-SES. This may provide insight into the social processes underlying health treatment decisions — conventional versus CAM, and if CAM, which specific types.

Author

• Kristin Kerns, University of Maryland