Ithaca College

David Turkon presented an invited lecture, “Conceptualizing Communities in Applied Anthropological Practice using a Social Network Paradigm: Experiences from Lesotho and South Africa,” to the Working Group on Anthropology and Population at Brown University on February 21.

David's talk focused on his contribution of a social network paradigm that brings a measure of social capital and social connectedness to a twenty year cohort study on childhood development in rural South Africa. The study, "Future Impacts Today: Long-Term Consequences of Early Environment," (FIT) is being carried out through the Department of Diatetics and Nutrition at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. FIT will track health and psyhchological profiles for a large rural cohort from nineteen weeks gestation to twenty years of age. David's contribution provides a means for assessing the degree to which social support networks influence childhood development across a number of measures, thus bringing a qualitative component to an inherently quantitative study.