University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 Faith And Doubt At The oD ctor’s: Class, Race, And The Role Of Community In Medical Decision Making Lindsay Wood Glassman University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Glassman, Lindsay Wood, "Faith And Doubt At The octD or’s: Class, Race, And The Role Of Community In Medical Decision Making" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3294. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3294 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3294 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Faith And Doubt At The oD ctor’s: Class, Race, And The Role Of Community In Medical Decision Making Abstract How do parents make medical decisions for themselves and their children? Why do some parents agree to interventions – such as vaccines, obstetrical treatment, and antibiotics – that others do not? And how do class and race shape those decisions? Past research has shown that white, middle class parents are the most likely to refuse medical interventions on philosophical grounds, including vaccines (Reich 2016a). Yet the existing research does not help us understand why others in similar circumstances don’t make the same choice, nor how we should understand working class patients with their own medical refusals. The current study seeks to address these puzzles by taking a comparative view of medical decisions. Drawing on data from ninety interviews with middle- and working-class adults (overwhelmingly mothers) and over three years of ethnographic research, I show that community ties play a vital role in shaping participants’ medical decisions.