TY - JOUR
T1 - Community hygiene norm violators are consistently stigmatized
T2 - Evidence from four global sites and implications for sanitation interventions
AU - Slade, Alexandra
AU - Wutich, Amber
AU - du Bray, Margaret V.
AU - Maupin, Jonathan
AU - Schuster, Roseanne C.
AU - Gervais, Matthew M.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2019/1
Y1 - 2019/1
N2 - Community sanitation interventions increasingly leverage presumed innate human disgust emotions and desire for social acceptance to change hygiene norms. While often effective at reducing open defecation and encouraging handwashing, there are growing indications from ethnographic studies that this strategy might create collateral damage, such as reinforcing stigmatized identities in ways that can drive social or economic marginalization. To test fundamental ethnographic propositions regarding the connections between hygiene norm violations and stigmatized social identities, we conducted 267 interviews in four distinct global sites (in Guatemala, Fiji, New Zealand, USA) between May 2015 and March 2016. Based on 148 initial codes applied to 23,278 interview segments, text-based analyses show that stigmatizing labels and other indices of contempt readily and immediately attach to imagined hygiene violators in these diverse social settings. Moral concerns are much more salient at all sites than disease/contagion ones, and hygiene violators are extended little empathy. Contrary to statistical predictions, however, non-empathetic moral reactions to women hygiene violators are no harsher than those of male violators. This improved evidentiary base illuminates why disgust- and shame-based sanitation interventions can so easily create unintended social damage: hygiene norm violations and stigmatizing social devaluations are consistently cognitively connected.
AB - Community sanitation interventions increasingly leverage presumed innate human disgust emotions and desire for social acceptance to change hygiene norms. While often effective at reducing open defecation and encouraging handwashing, there are growing indications from ethnographic studies that this strategy might create collateral damage, such as reinforcing stigmatized identities in ways that can drive social or economic marginalization. To test fundamental ethnographic propositions regarding the connections between hygiene norm violations and stigmatized social identities, we conducted 267 interviews in four distinct global sites (in Guatemala, Fiji, New Zealand, USA) between May 2015 and March 2016. Based on 148 initial codes applied to 23,278 interview segments, text-based analyses show that stigmatizing labels and other indices of contempt readily and immediately attach to imagined hygiene violators in these diverse social settings. Moral concerns are much more salient at all sites than disease/contagion ones, and hygiene violators are extended little empathy. Contrary to statistical predictions, however, non-empathetic moral reactions to women hygiene violators are no harsher than those of male violators. This improved evidentiary base illuminates why disgust- and shame-based sanitation interventions can so easily create unintended social damage: hygiene norm violations and stigmatizing social devaluations are consistently cognitively connected.
KW - Behavior change
KW - Community-Led Total Sanitation
KW - Culture
KW - Hygiene
KW - Intervention
KW - Norms
KW - Sanitation
KW - Stigma
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U2 - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.10.020
DO - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.10.020
M3 - Article
C2 - 30390470
AN - SCOPUS:85055750367
SN - 0277-9536
VL - 220
SP - 12
EP - 21
JO - Social Science and Medicine
JF - Social Science and Medicine
ER -