A Qualitative Study of Cultural Perception of Health in Rural Guatemala

Overview

The Investigators will be giving a survey to \~100 people in a rural community in Guatemala to discover beliefs and perspectives that the Participants have surrounding various aspects of healthcare. The Investigators aim to do this in order to be able to better serve the population in the community by discovering specific information about them from the Participants and how the Participants about different health practices. The Investigators will answer their research questions through the questionnaire that will allow participants to explain their viewpoints about a variety of medical topics.

The design of this cross-sectional study is centered around a structured questionnaire of a mixed qualitative and quantitative nature that is composed primarily of yes/no or Likert scale responses. All questions are written with the intent that they may be understood by those participants without any formal education. The investigators will recruit participants that are currently using the services of the Trifinio clinic in rural Guatemala as these are likely to fit inclusion criteria and will be able to benefit from potential future services that will be directed by the findings of this questionnaire. For all participants, Likert scale questions will be used with a series of faces to help indicate meanings for the answers and to decrease possibility of misinterpretation. Participants will be recruited through non-probabilistic sampling and the use of snowball sampling. Screening of these participants for exclusion criteria will be performed before questionnaires are distributed. The questions of the questionnaire are designed to elicit information about certain beliefs or preferences related to healthcare in a structured manner that allows us to compare answers and determine trends, prevalence, and associations that are likely to exist among community members. Participation will be completely voluntary and informed consent will be obtained from each participant before they are given the questionnaire. For participants who are illiterate or would prefer to have the informed consent and questionnaire read aloud to them, this will be done by one of the CITI-trained investigators. Recorded data will only include questionnaire responses and will not include any identifying information. We will be using randomized numbers in order to refer to completed questionnaires, but these numbers will have no identifying aspects and will be used for the sole purpose of keeping track of the gathered data. The information gathered will be de-identified and stored and password-protected through REDCap.

Conditions

Eligibility

Outcomes