The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

My take home message from this week's readings was that in many instances focussing on "adapting behaviors" would do much good than focussing on "prevention". Of course, ideally, we should work on prevention behaviors but there are situations in which culture, structure and agency make it difficult to display the preventive behaviors. In such circumstances, an adaptive behavior makes sense.  Lifeskills training, training to negotiate, skill building on taking the optimum decisions within the context are ways in which we promote "adaptive behaviors". Of course I am trying to connect culturally situated approaches with the "behavioral" approaches. Focussing on adaptive behaviors also has a good match with the "prediction" objective; as they are more efficient and achievable.  Consider the oft discussed case of vegetable and fruit consumption as a cancer prevention behavior being advised to the inner city population. Here, we would not...