On the Rationality of Decision-Making Studies: Part 2: Divergent Rationalities

A study of treatment decision making in an Anishinaabe community in Manitoba, Canada was designed to be comparable with an earlier project carried out in a Mexican town. One objective was to compare the resulting decision models. For both communities, a decision-making perspective was compatible with how individuals talked about actions taken in response to illness, and it proved to be a useful means for learning about 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 this finding reflects the variable potentiality, in the Anishinaabe community, for affliction and its treatment to be constructed within a cultural framework in which the underlying assumptions differ from those implicit in studies of decision modeling.