ON THE RATIONALITY OF DECISION-MAKING STUDIES - PART 2 - DIVERGENT RATIONALITIES

A study of treatment decision making in an Anishinaabe community in Ma nitoba, Canada was designed to be comparable with an earlier project c arried our in a Mexican town. One objective was to compare the resulti ng decision models. For both communities, a decision-making perspectiv e was compatible with how individuals talked about actions taken in re sponse to illness, and it proved to be a useful means for learning abo ut the process of seeking care. At the same time, a decision-modeling approach is better suited to explaining treatment actions taken in the Mexican community than in the Anishinaabe community. I suggest that t his finding reflects the variable potentiality, in the Anishinaabe com munity, for affliction and its treatment to be constructed within a cu ltural framework in which the underlying assumptions differ from those implicit in studies of decision modeling.