As professor of anthropology, Linda Hunt conducts medical research in southern Michigan, which has yielded two benefits.
First, using clinical observations, she hopes to help physicians, physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners understand how they manage chronic illnesses among minorities.
“We want to see how they understand what they call health disparities,” Hunt said. “Some groups of people in the population are more susceptible to chronic diseases than others, minority populations particularly, and that they’re thought to have differential treatment response.”
Hunt’s study also gives her a chance to help her students understand the methodology involving research and data-gathering.
“I love it on many levels,” Hunt said. “In the immediate sense, it gives me a sense of satisfaction to have something concrete that I can be giving to my students to use as a learning tool.
“The act of going out and collecting data is kind of why you’re in the business. When you get farther in your career, your opportunities to do that are more and more limited.”
###