Cultural Brokerage

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Cultural Brokerage

• Serves to mediate between health care providers
  and individuals/communities that are ethnically
  distinctive.
• Cultural brokerage and competency are aspects of
  the same process.
• Cultural competency has increased understanding
  and appreciation of cultural differences and the
  capacity to provide culturally appropriate
  services.

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Concepts of cultural brokerage

• Culture
• Health culture
• Co-culture Central
• Concept of cultural brokerage
• Culture broker
• Accommodates link between co-cultures
• Culture mediation
• Process of linkage between co-cultures, based on
  culture brokers knowledge of the involved
  cultures.

3
Phases of the process (4 steps)

• Compilation of research data
• Training of brokers in aspects of community life
• Early activation of the culture broker role
• Brokerage efforts cause change

4
Cultural competence

• Consists of the skills, knowledge, and policies
  that allow a person or organization to provide
  service effectively in a cross-culture situation
• Defines culture as the shared values, traditions,
  norms, customs, arts, history, folklore, and
  institutions of a group of people

5
Participatory Development

• The method by which individuals and groups of a
  community normally solve problems, achieve goals,
  and in turn better their lives.
• Although this usually occurs in healthy
  communities, sometimes the process can be
  improved and difficult issues can be overcome
  more quickly with the help of a trained
  individual.

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Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA
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Participatory Rural Appraisal

• Definition A participatory research technique
  used to plan and assess development projects and
  programs.
• Enables rural people to share, enhance, and
  analyze their knowledge of life and conditions,
  to plan and to act. (Chambers 1994953)

8

• Quantitative Methods
• Mapping the institutions or physical settings of
  a community, constructing seasonal calendars,
  creating health and wealth rankings, and rating
  community preferences.

9

• Problems using only quantitative
• Ideas framed from outsider perspectives and
  priorities and over complication ?
• issues of the community unaddressed.
• Specialists not effective in communicating with
  the community and/or others using the research.
• Research may be done just for researchs sake and
  not in a time effective manner allowing for
  project success

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• Therefore, critical to the effectiveness of the
  Quantitative methods is the participation of the
  community members.
• Why?
• Using participation increases the likelihood that
  the research will reflect the true needs and
  wants of the community.
• Why?

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• What are its practical uses
• Natural resource utilization and management
• Poverty assessment
• Agriculture
• Health and nutrition
• Urban needs assessment
• Food security
• Many others

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History

• PRA was developed from Rapid Appraisal Methods
  that emerged in the late 1970s under various
  names, mainly RRA (Rapid Rural Appraisal), in
  order to replace the traditional survey.

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What is RRA

• Similar to an ethnography
• Jotting down observations and conducting flexible
  format interviews.

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Confused? RRA vs. PRA

• PRA uses the participation of community members
  in the appraisal before a development plan.
• RRA has the experts take field notes and data and
  later analyze it.
• PRA researcher solely facilitates. Less central
  to the research process.

15
PRA Process and Approach

• Behaviors and attitudes of outsiders must
  facilitate and not dominate.
• Use methods that shift the normal balance from
  closed to open, from individual to group, from
  verbal to visual, and from measuring to
  comparing.
• Partnership and sharing of information,
  experience, food and training, between insiders
  and outsiders, and between organizations.